In my group were:
Liam De Costa - Actor
Chi-Yin Wong - Actor
Brian Wong - Sound
Myself - Cameraman/ Producer
Lawrence Thomas James Maskell - Editor/ Director
We were allocated the production studio & workshop to shoot in.
I came up with a quick story sequence on my phone:
We shot everything we could in the two hour session. We thought we had all the shots we needed.
However when the sequence was edited together it had several issues:
- For the first ten seconds nothing happened. There was a slow pan across an empty room dissolving to an empty chair and desk. The pacing was too slow.
- Every cut was a dissolve. Dissolves are normally used to denote the passage of time however our sequence was happening in real time.
- We were missing several close ups, for example when Chi see's the phone on the desk after walking in, we were missing a close up of the phone.
- We were missing key continuity shots which meant that people jumped around locations and confused the audience.
- Our sequence didn't have an ending.
Unfortunately our editor deleted this version of the film and used the Premier file to carry on working on the second version, so a direct comparison is not possible.
The next week we came back and after critiquing the first version we had 40 minutes to shoot pick ups.
Again I made a quick list of what we thought we needed:
- We decided to shoot a new establishing pan which ended with our protagonist already sitting at the desk. This avoided shooting an empty room and picked up the pace slightly.
- We shot a new medium close up of our phone-less hero working.
- We needed a shot of the two characters passing so that the audience weren't left wondering why they didn't see each other on the way out.
- We didn't have a shot of Chi entering the room so we shot that. We also shot an insert of his feet walking for coverage.
- Once we got outside we were very pushed for time so I went handheld and we quickly shot an ending to our sequence. All the exterior pick up shots were done in about ten minutes.
The final version after pick ups:
The latest version is much improved. It has a cohesive story and is easy to follow. It's pace is much better and it works.
Note: The file was exported at quite a low resolution from Premier which is why it looks quite soft on YouTube.
There are still a few ways it could be improved. Some from the shoot and others in the edit:
- 0:09 The close up of the phone is cropped out of a shot we had slowly zooming out and so is noticeably grainy.
- 0:13 The shot is exposed for the bright monitor screen leaving the rest of the shot too dark. Additional light was necessary.
- 0:27 The footsteps are too loud.
- 0:51 Again the shot is too dark apart from the blown out monitors. Given time I would turn them off, light the scene and comp them back in.
- 0:55 Chi is slightly cropped at top of frame. I would pull the framing back a bit to get both the desk and his whole head in.
- 1:01 Continuity. Chi is holding the phone high in the previous shot then in this shot it is low again.
- 1:19 Slightly over exposed. Would turn down brightness in post.
- 1:36 Dialogue isn't loud enough. Sound man wasn't using headphones at this point due to time constraints.
- 1:36 Sharp contrast between sunny and non sunny areas. Sunny areas slightly blown out.
- 1:40 Shadow of crew visible in window.
- 1:43 White balance changes as Chi enters sunny area.
I'm pretty happy with it overall given the time constraints and I think Lawrence did a great job editing it into a narrative sequence.
