One Shot

I have been doing one shot film for nearly 3 weeks now, I have really enjoyed it, however had a few complications along the way...

The first lesson was pretty boring, going through all the health and safety precautions, however we then got put into our groups and started to think about our films. Due to the huge lack of enthusiasm from my group I quickly arranged to change groups as I wanted to be productive and get on with the film, due to a lot of other work I had to. I joined my new group after the first week and quickly caught up with them. We met in the week to discuss how we were going to film our idea and where and when it was all going to take place. Our film was about drink driving, we were going to have a couple of us drunk getting into a car and running someone over. On the day of filming I was really excited, despite the freezing cold we had to stand in for hours. However we managed to get what we wanted pretty quickly although there were a few complications. First of all the camera screen was a slight shade of blue, we didn't know what it was supposed to look like but assumed it wasn't meant to be blue. We could not solve this as we didn't know how to change it. Since then I have found out the white balance was off and I now know how to change it thanks to someone I know on a broadcast course. So besides the blue screen we started filming, me and Janos were behind the camera, I was in charge of the light balance as he moved the camera. We had to change the lighting balance as we zoomed in and out of the frame as we found it went too dark or florescent. The main problem for us was the background noise, as there was a cleaning truck taking all the time in the world cleaning the street by our location. I politely asked if they could stop for two minutes, but apparently people just arnt as nice as they used to be these days. When it came to editing our film, the noise was the biggest problem, the noise from the truck just made the whole film like crackle. We boldly decided to cut out all our audio from the film and replace it with a soundtrack. It has actually worked out so much better even tho we spent a very long time finding the right song. We had one more problem with our film... when we put the tape in the VCR the tape got stuck and snapped in the machine... we were almost in tears as we had worked so hard on it, however the technician told us there was a very small chance he could fix it for us by sellotaping the tape back together, but even if this worked we wouldn't be able to rewind the tape once we had played it. Turns out someone likes us as the tape worked and we managed to record it to the external hardrive. But he was right we couldn't rewind it so the tape got destroyed. The result of the tape breaking in the VCR means we have a cut at the beginning of our film, it sort of shakes but we cant change that unless we film all over again and with the time we had left non of us really wanted to be doing that. What we have created with everything that went wrong is brilliant. I am very proud of it and am now considering film next year.