I think I have learnt an awful lot about filming from this project. Before starting I thought that my knowledge of the technology was at a reasonable level but from doing this I have realised how much I’ve learnt. I haven’t just learnt about the technology though-also the practicalities of filming and how things are more difficult than they often appear to be.
For one of the first shots of the feet running we had thought that we would put the camera on a skateboard as the dolley was unavailable however we soon discovered that this was not possible. We them tried running alongside but that didn’t work either so we had to zoom in and use the tripod and pan round following the feet. The main problem was with the horse shots. We had initially planned to just have the two people riding off on the horse but we couldn’t have both people on the horse so we then decided on having just one person however we had to do this in an arena so was hard to film and make it look like it fitted the genre. Added to this it made no sense that there was only one of the two people on the horse and they had a riding helmet on as they said it was illegal to ride without one. This also didn’t fit the genre so we had to change it. We considered many things: putting them on a car and driving it down a field, get them to stand in a car through the sunroof and drive, and putting then in a shopping trolley and rolling that down a hill however we had to rule all these out because of being unsafe and unpractical. We ended up filming close ups of the hooves by driving alongside it on a quad bike whilst someone was riding it, the over the head shots by Nikki riding it and filming at the same time and the shots of the people by getting two friends to agree to carry them on their shoulders. This was still tricky to do particularly as it was raining and we had limited time before the light faded. We held an umbrella over the camera whilst filming to prevent rain on the lens and just shot as much as we could.
Because some of the scenes had been filmed at different times in the day and in different conditions we had to change the contrast and darken some so that it flowed well and looked consistent. Before starting this I would have had no idea how to do this but after a few trials we got it right.
<- darkened version
Another problem that we encountered was getting the sound right. Wind interference was a problem but we couldn’t just cut the sound completely as it wouldn’t have felt right. We ended up fading the music in and out over some of the wind to cover it and with some shots (the zoomed in feet, horses and shouting) we had to film the sound separately and line it up with the clips. We had to make sure we did it accurately though as it was hard to get the sound of the footsteps to match up with the feet touching the ground, it took a while but otherwise it wouldn’t have looked right. With the horse shots at the end we cut, copied and pasted certain clips over again repeating some to make it longer, we had to paste sound from different shots in too. At the end of it we used shots where the horse was not going as fast to make it seen as though it was slowing down. We had to edit lots of it very precisely so that it looked right (for example we didn’t have a foot in the hooves shot or shoulders in the shot of the people ‘riding the horse’) and flowed.
<- we had to edit the feet out of it.
I also learnt how to import clips from an SD card, convert them to clips to be used in final vut express and how to use a youtub converter.
Proficient evaluation.
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