Preliminary Exercise Evaluation 4

4) What factors did you have to take into account when planning, shooting and editing?
When we were planning, we knew we had to take into account our limitations on time, which were that we only had one hour to plan, one hour to shoot, and one hour to edit, which meant we had to keep things fairly short and simple, whilst still meeting the brief. We also had to think about our location, and the environment of that location. We had to shoot in school, so there was a lot to think about it in terms of background noise from bells and classrooms, and people walking around, getting in shots or limiting time because we would have to wait. When we planned, we didn't know what the weather would be like on our day of shooting, so decided against filming outside - it also is a far less controlled environment. In the end we chose to film in the media block as it was the most convenient and had everything we needed.
When we were shooting, we had to remember to get the shot types right in terms of distance, cut-off points, and movement, which meant taking time to set up shots. Continuity was, of course, very important, so as well as planning our shots carefully and using a storyboard to check continuity, when we were actually shooting we had to take the environment into account; we put paper over the windows in the door we were using in case people walked by outside and suddenly appeared behind the door in any shots, and we also had to try to avoid getting any bells ringing or other people talking/shouting 'action' etc. in any of our shots, which was quite tricky. Also, we knew that we would be using non-linear editing, and for our shot-reverse-shots we just filmed all of the dialogue twice (plus all the takes...), with the focus on one of the characters each time. This meant that during the editing process we had a lot of cutting up to do, and checking to make sure things stayed the same in each shot.