Practising with equipment

At school we were given our camera, tripod and all the items we needed to start on our filming for our 2 minute opening coursework in the half term. We collected all of our equipment and went out to experiment with it in order to get used to it and have a bit more understanding of how to use it all. We took our camera and tripod into the playground and it was quite bright outside, we noticed that lighting could prove to be difficult as the sun was dominating the shot. We moved the camera and the tripod to a different position, facing away from the sun, the logical thing to do.. and the lighting was much better and we could see objects properly. A couple of times we had just a black screen and kept forgetting we had left the lens cap on the camera, a simple but stupid mistake to make!

We got used to how the camera and tripod worked, adjusting the height of the tripod, and the angle the camera sat on top of the tripod. We filmed a small clip of me and charlotte sitting outside and then walking across the playground, as we wanted to put this onto the mac and attempt a bit of editing with it because we had an idea for our 2 minute coursework that we weren't sure would work or not.

For our 2 minute opening we have taken on the idea of a stalker man. As stalkers are often known to take pictures of their victims, we were attempting to slow down the clip we filmed and adding in a camera shutter sound. We wasn't sure if it would look alright or not so we had a go with editing it and we thought that it looked quite effective so we are keeping to the idea.

Another part of our film is going to be the man in the photography dark room. We were planning on using the new dark room, until we entered the old one! The old dark room was a lot smaller, older and looks slightly creepy. In the dark room, the stalker is going to be developing photos of the girl he is following in our opening. We thought this would make our opening quite effective by showing the stalker to be obsessed with his victim.


We took our camera into the dark room and obviously realised that it was very 'dark' in there. We decided we would experiment with the camera and turn on 'night' mode, this made a great effect and we are deciding to stick with it rather than filming it normally like we originally planned. Here is a picture of us in the dark room getting used to the lighting and planning where we can pin up photos of past victims around the room. We are going to put up photos on a line and have his next victim hanging up at the start of our opening so it shows she is next in line and is going to be stalked by the obsessed man. When we film in the dark room we are going to have to go in and set up as there are lots of un-needed things placed around the room in there.