Editing & Rough Cut

In our group, Elliot is the one who is in charge of the editing, while the rest of us will help and give input whenever and wherever we can. So far, things are looking good, if anything our biggest issue is that we have enough footage for a 15 minute film, which we can only use 4 minutes of, therefore picking which bits to use and which bits to sacrifice is currently and will continue to be rather difficult.

We therefore decided it would be most effective to simply make the film as we had originally intended, and worry about the length once everything was in place. After having done this, although we all enjoyed the film and thought it looked brilliant, we realised that we were around 2 and a half minutes over the limit. In order to remedy this, we ultimately decided to cut more or less the entire first section, where you see Sophie walking home and encountering the drug deal, the chav and the homeless person. As much as we liked these sections, we realised that, in terms of the overall plot, they didn't really add anything, it merely set up the idea that the protagonist lived in a rough area, however this fact can be established through the inclusion of the parents arguing later in the film.

After having removed that, and rounded off a few corners with some shots, we were left with a  film that lasted dead on 4 minutes, excluding the credits, of which you can see below:

From watching this, there were a few things we still wanted to do, such as colour grade the shots, emphasizing the black and white more in the flashback shots, therefore making it look less grey, and emphasizing the blue's and pinks in the rehearsal shots. We also still needed to add the sound effects of the parents, played by Myself and Amelia, in over the shots of the protagonist at home.

After showing this to our tutor, he suggested removing some of the parts earlier where the camera goes out of focus unnecessarily and to change the last shot to something that looks more determined, as he felt the protagonist looked scared, which rather defeated the point of her building up the confidence to perform at the end of the film.

Filming Session 4

This session was our biggest one to date, consisting of three separate shoots, one in the rehearsal room in the morning, one in the Aphra storage cupboard and the final one in Kg's house in Parkwood. While it was certainly a long day, it was a highly productive one as it resulted in us having captured everything we would need for the film, and calling it a wrap.

The morning session went just as well as the first rehearsal section, we booked out the room, managed to get there with the equipment without any hassle and filmed everything we needed to, and with the time we had spare, we went over a few things we thought might look good on camera, some worked and some didn't, but the more footage we have the better. Below are some screenshots from the shoot.

The second shoot of the day was in the storage room that's connected to the Aphra drama studio, and again this went very well. We managed to get some very interesting and unique looking shots in this room through using the large cage-like doors inside, and through using the overall 'grottiness' of the room to our advantage.

The last shoot of the day, and the last shoot we did at all, was a very small amount of shots set inside the protagonists house, and mostly her bedroom. We were barely there for half an hour before we had finished, and yet again, there were few issues. We filmed everything we wanted to relatively quickly and again grabbed a few more shots that we thought up on the spot. To grasp how what exactly we accomplished that day, please see the below Call Sheet.

Filming Overall

While there are many things that can go wrong with filming, other than a few small mishaps, filming went smoothly and to plan overall. We had no issues with the crew, the locations all worked well for the film and the cast were beyond brilliant, both in effort and efficiency. If anything, we had some issues with the equipment, being given the wrong cables, or missing a battery, but nothing we couldn't adapt to and overcome. I am very pleased with everything that we have filmed and am looking forward to seeing how it looks when everything is stitched together.

Filming Session 3

For this shoot we were in the Aphra, filming the very end where the Protagonist steps out in front of the Judges to do her dance. This required us to attempt to work in, practically, the dark, and so had to come up with some inventive lighting methods, most of which were done through the use of fairy lights, for instance, in a medium close up shot where we see all four of the Judges, we placed the fairy lights in their laps, just out of shot, therefore illuminating them from below. Overall, yet again this shoot went very smoothly, the cast and crew all worked hard and efficiently, resulting in us actually finishing earlier than expected.

Below is the call sheet for the shoot.

Filming Session 2

Our second filming session came quite a while after our first, simply because work outside of digital filmmaking seemed to build up for all of us towards the end of February, however it was easy to pick up where we had left off. For this filming session, we were starting with the rehearsal sequence inside the dance studio in Woody's. This therefore meant booking out the room with the School of Arts, of which we did with ease. Once we had set up the equipment, and most importantly the LED's, of which had blue and purple filters on them, we got to work. For the most part, we simply allowed Sophie to perform her Dance to the music, all the meanwhile we would work around her with the camera, therefore collecting a plethora of various angles and shots of her, of which we an cut in and out of when it comes to editing later on. On top of the tracking shots, we also did various still shots from different points in the room, some wide angles, some close, some in focus, some out of focus, all in all resulting in us having captured the dance in its entirety.

Below is a copy of the call sheet for the shoot, despite it saying call sheet 1, it is in fact the second one, this is merely a typo.

We had a few technical mishaps that day however, but we manged to improvise and pull through, for instance the LED's had to be plugged into the wall sockets and so weren't able to move very far, therefore to do closeups we used fairy lights in order to illuminate Sophie more clearly.

Below are some stills from the shoot, each one showing how we attempted to use the LED's on set to give the shots their own unique look, that being said, in the final version we will still probably colour grade it slightly in order to fully cement the contrast between the rehearsal sections and the flashbacks.