Monday 9th February - Last Filming Session

This was a crucial lesson for our group. We had to film all of our indoor filming or at least most of it otherwise our production will not meet the deadline. We wanted to make the most of this session and take as much as we can from it. The first thing we did was setting up the set and made sure the mise en scene illustrated a connection with what our thriller was about. Setting up the room took around 45 minutes as we had to move many things and bring in a lot of equipment. We also committed ourselves to try and get equipment we thought we couldn’t get like the red spot light we used. All these little things added to the quality of how it will look on film.

Rushan, our teacher’s assistant, was available today so he worked with our group because the other entire groups were filming offsite. He watched us prepare and add little comments for us to think about and maybe consider whilst filming. When we started, I took the role of the director and camera man, Sevin took control with the props, make up artist for Selma and costume designer, Selma was the official alien actor with the biggest acting role and Ola was the second actor (the doctor) and all so helped with setting up the set and making sure the lighting was in place. It was also my job to see if certain props were in the right place and that the lighting was good for the film to capture because our first filming session had poor quality lighting when we saw it played back.

There were some let downs when starting this session as we did not have everything we wanted. One example is that we wanted to use the computer screen as a life support machine. We searched on youtube.com if it had a video of the image of the lines of a life support machine. This was not available and we decided not to bother with it because it was time consuming. I believe this would have made our production look better as the communication the life support machine gives the audience is very suspenseful in my opinion but we had to scrap the idea because we couldn’t find it anywhere on the internet, even when we asked our teacher if she knew where we could find it.

The previous lesson we had filmed most of Ola’s appearing scenes because Selma was not ready in terms of costume wise. This meant that we had to get right of to her parts as she is the main character. It was my job to think of all the camera shots we should use so the previous night I thought of some camera shots we should definitely use. Whilst filming, Rushan, Sevin and Ola gave me tips and expressed what they thought I should add. This was helpful as fresh ideas proved to be impactful because of the various camera shot we used. This way we had many different camera shots of one action, which was good because we had a variety to choose from and also had the option to use them as match cuts. The most use of camera shots were the high angle shot, low angle shot, close up or long shot just for one action. This was done for future purposes like when we start editing.

Sevin did a great job in preparing Selma’s individual scenes as she showed her dedication by searching for fake blood in the media department, placing Selma in a certain position to make it look more realistic and somehow got good strong rope from the textiles department. We were happy with Sevin’s preparation very much because it showed her passion for this project and because everyone showed their desire for us to make an outstanding piece of work.

We proceeded with the filming on Selma. This scene showed her tied to a table with rope and her eyes blindfolded. The first shots were various camera shots, but mostly close ups, of her struggling to get out and moving her body to escape free. After this we finally started filming the parts where Ola and Selma are both shown in the same picture. I came up with the opening shot of me holding the camera behind the fan and walking around the fan towards Selma ending up with a horizontal pan of her body whilst she is struggling to escape. After we realised that all our lighting was different from our previous filming session so then decided to film all Ola’s parts again because the old footage wouldn’t look professional with our new footage. Also because Ola had pens in his doctor coat’s pocket and did not have the pens during this session.

One scene what was very difficult was Ola’s scene of him putting on his surgery gloves. We had many outtakes because they did slip into Ola’s hands smoothly. This was frustrating at times because we really wanted to have this shot but was also very humorous at the same time. Eventually he got it right and we then were able to proceed. All the other shots came out well, especially our high angle long shot which wanted to use as a CCTV shot of Selma. These came out better than expected.

We knew time was always going to be an issue so our group stayed in at break to carry on. This pleased me as everyone showed the same amount of dedication towards this project and this proved it. There were no interruptions during our filming allowing us to work faster and our motivation was shown as we had nearly finished all the filming. This resulted in us catching up with all the other groups.

Overall, his was our most successful session and everyone left with a high level of satisfaction because of the incredible amount of work we fitted in during one lesson. We had met the aims of using as many different camera shots which was good as I could recall that Mary, our teacher, said this was crucial in order to gain many marks.

We were all interviewed individually by an A2 student because he was making a documentary about AS thrillers. He sounded very interested in our thriller as he spent most of his time watching us film. he asked us how we thought we were going and what our thriller was about. He only had positive feedback and responses from him and he said that he can’t wait to see ours when we finish our project.