Week 1 & 2 (04/09 & 11/09)

My first week on the course was challenging but still very enjoyable for me. When I first came to the college I wasn’t enrolled on this course and had to transfer, which I found a lot easier than I anticipated. Although coming in the course three days later than most others in the class I feel like I have adapted and dealt with the transfer very well and I already feel very welcomed by the staff and other students. When I joined the class, my first task was to create a ‘one minute movie’ over a few days. Having joined late I had to join a group of 5 others who’d already come up with the idea of ‘The Chase’ and had made the storyboard. This created  a slight challenge for me as I felt I joined the group halfway through the productuon, but in the end I still think I made a worthy contribution when we were filming even though our ideas may have differed as I wasn’t there during the time the ideas were being produced.

Overall, the filming process took roughly a day worth of lessons all together. For our film we filmed in different areas within the college using different filming techniques and angles.  An initial struggle we had with filming was continuity, for example when shooting we had to remember which hand the bottle of water was being held in. However, for our first project I don’t feel too concerned about this as it is all part of the learning process and we now know for next time what to keep in mind to improve. Another challenge we encountered was dealing with things such as people around us walking in and out of shots. This was especially a problem for us as a large part of our movie was filmed in our college shop, meaning we had to ask permission to film in the shop and the staff had to work around us as we were shooting, as well as people entering the shop to buy things. This taught us about choosing our locations wisely for our next filming shoots. Using a variety different techniques helped us as, although we didn’t use all of our clips that we filmed, this helped us as we learnt which angles work with which types of scenes and the effects of different settings etc. We got different angles such as shots of feet running past the camera and down stairs.

The next step for our one minute movie was to wrap up our shooting and begin editing. This started in the morning with us being taught the basics of using Adobe Premiere, ranging from simply inserting our footage to using the razor tool to split up our audio and footage. I think learning through this method was very good as we were taught in a way that we had to figure out the smaller details on our own, which helped me remember and look for the more advanced effects and editing technique, but weren’t lost on a program we’d never used before. I worked in a pair with someone in my group to edit our work and it took us just over a day worth of lessons until we were ready to render our completed project. I think that editing was my favourite part of the whole project as editing has always been my favourite part of filmmaking and this was my first time I had access to better equipped computers with such advanced editing programmes. In my opinion, there weren’t any major issues with the editing process that couldn’t have been solved with research or asking (e.g. how to add a certain effect). However, one problem was that we didn’t feel like we had enough footage at the beginning, but a way we solved this was editing and splitting other clips to create clips that looked different from the original.