Children's film, the first day of filming

We filmed the first part of our footage on Monday, using our story-board as a plan.

Before we began filming we set up the characters and props in the way we wanted them to look in the film. Our main character is a nerd who gains the ability to read minds after an accident, we gave Reece a combover to accentuate the look we wanted to give him. We also gave him large glasses and a psychology book (both provided by Vicky) to use as props. Our next character was the antagonist of the film, and therefore we wanted him to look as mean as possible. He looks like the opposite of Reece. For props Michael had his skateboard and headphones.

We tried to film in chronological order so that it would be easier to keep track of the footage that we had filmed. Our establishing shot was one where Michael is coming round the corner on his skateboard, but because of errors due to the wind which was blowing that day (making it harder to communicate) and because of people passing the pathway which we were using; we had to film it nine times. However our most complicated shot was the important collision which happens at the start of the film. In order to film the shot we had to coordinate two actors at a time. Which was hard because Dan had to tell Michael when to skate towards the doorway and Vicky had to tell Reece when to walk out of the automatic doors next to the refectory; for practical reasons we never planned to film the collision. After five goes, we eventually got the shot we needed and were able to continue onto other more simple tasks.

The task of filming was made even more difficult by interruptions to the footage and if we had planned to shoot in sound the dialogue would have been ruined by people trying to disturb our filming. Overall, we got the shots that we needed and most are good quality because we persisted and kept re-shooting until we were certain that we had a really good clip.

We are currently editing our footage to check if we have the shots we need or if new shots will need to be filmed to fill the timeframe which we have been given.