Test Shoots

Our group did 2 test shoots, this is due to the first one not turning out very well. On the first test shoot we planned to do the fight scene that leads someone into dying, however, it came out too non-naturalistic and made the supposedly intense opening scene look comical so we had to entirely rethink the opening scene, so instead we went for the bit just after the murder had taken place. We chose to start it here so that we could have a stand off between the woman and the police officer, this is as many western films create tension through this method as having two people pointing weapons at each other, the audience wonders who is going to be killed first.

Test Shoot 1
For our first test shoot we got the storyboard that we designed and headed out to get some actors. One of our group members volunteered to be an actress and then we got another actress from the study room. we filmed the test shoot on my phone, this meant that all of our shots were hand held which was good for the thriller aspect of the film as the footage was shaky and this put more movement into the scene which fitted in well with the fight scene.

The footage came out nice, we used a high white balance, this made the footage look like we were filming in the evening, it also worked with the fact that we were filming in autumn and the orange tint the footage had looked complimentary to the colour of the leaves on the trees. The aperture and ISO were had to figure out as the backdrop of the countryside was very bright and we wanted to see the actress and the background but it was a struggle to see the background and not make the actress a silhouette, eventually however, we decided to use a low ISO and a higher aperture, this caused the light sensitivity to be lower and the aperture allowed more light into the lens, this combined with the lower light sensitivity allowed both the background and the actress to be seen.

Editing the test shoot however, was what made us need to redo the test shoot, our shots did not look right, in post and trying to fit them into each other felt unnatural and forced. The final product looked beyond average, the fight scene lasted about 3 seconds and the story/genre looked unclear, this wasn't only to do with the filming however, it was to do with the entire story of the opening sequence, so we went back to the drawing board to completely redesign the opening sequence.

Test Shoot 2
In our groups second test shoot we wanted to eradicate all of the problems that we had with the first test shoot, for the most part we did and we got a better end product which was a big achievement, however, when I was watching over the footage before editing, I noticed that one of our group members was in a considerable amount of the shots, this meant that I had to edit around them which made a few of the cuts in the footage a bit jumpy, however, it is a test shoot so it isn't meant to be perfect, and we were happy as a group at the final result.

We spoke to our media teacher and he suggested a new narrative for the opening sequence,
so we set out to try and film it, and then we realised how we could mess around with it and make it look appealing, the idea was that a police officer points a gun at a panicked looking woman and then the woman looks distressed and starts crying shouting that she 'didn't do it' and then do a tracking shot around thew characters and then it reveals a dead woman on the floor, the woman who is insisting that she didn't do it is holding a knife, after the officer convinces her to drop the knife, he cuffs her and walks away with her.

Filming the idea was good, it wasn't a dull idea, and playing with new ideas to change the idea around was interesting, this lead to the filming not being dull which was something we worried about if we were doing a scene without a fight scene, but, the footage came out well, we used the aspects that we liked about the first test shoot as building blocks for the second test shoot, so we used the same camera settings and the same handheld aspect. I also thought that it would be a good idea to put a oner in the scene so we filmed an entire version of the scene where it was just a oner which I personally would have rather used instead of editing together the clips, but we missed the walking away scene at the end so we couldn't only have one cut in the sequence otherwise it would have looked unnatural so we had to do a few cuts but we still managed to incorporate the oner in the scene.