Media Production work: Filming Process

Date: 01/03/11

This was our first day of filming for our practical assessment in media. We have to create a film opening using a range of camerawork and editing techniques such as close ups, shot reverse shot, long shot etc. We even have to come up with a name for our film and production company and include some credits for the film. To do this successfully we spent the first few weeks planning and preparing by creating storyboards and researching other film openings of the same genre. The genre we decided to do for our practical is a thriller. We felt a thriller would suit our group best because most of our group has seen or likes watching thrillers, plus we all knew of the most suitable locations for our opening. To get a better idea of what the film would look like we decided to do a trial run with one of the locations. We went to a local park which has a playground and several blocks of flats behind it. Here we filmed the protagonist (Zainab) being followed by her best friend, however her best friend is dead and has come back as a ghost to haunt her.

We thought this location would be suitable because firstly we wanted to film a typical, regular sunny day. This way we would be leaving the audience to believe that everything in the scene would be ordinary. However as our film is thriller we thought that it would show a good contrast between the bright, sunny normal day and the dark, gothic themes in the film like the ghost.

As it was our first time filming in this particular location we had to try and find the best place to use. The shots we decided to film were the following:

· Pan shot- this shot showed Zainab running down a path with the camera following her while at the same time showing the ghost figure watching her. We decided to film this shot because we thought it would create dramatic irony and would keep the audiences attention.

· Long shot- this shot showed Zainab finally noticing the ghost figure and running away. We thought this shot would work best because as well as catching Zainab running away we get a clear shot of the location and where it is set.

These were just some examples of the shots we did during this session. As this was our first day filming we did not capture as much footage as we hoped mainly because we couldn’t decide where and what the best shots were to film. However the shots we did film worked well because we tried each shot at different angles to give us more variety. We hope that by doing this throughout the rest of our production the audience will find it more interesting to watch.