One Shot Project Evaluation.

One Shot movie, this is the second project whilst doing Multimedia at university. We were given the brief to create a movie that consisted of just one take with strict rules that we had to use a tripod and only move the camera once. At first we were given a camera and were sent out to make a short one shot film with for word of inspiration. This exercise was intended for to get use to camera and prepare use for the project that was ahead. I feel this exercise went really well for our first time, We had a few problems and had to take a few takes to get it right.

I thought that the exercise was a slight hint on how to handle this project, so to make this a successful project we decided to keep this simple and not to over to complicate it by thinking to much about every thing. We did have a problem though we struggled to come with an idea and where we could film. We wanted to take the film away from student life and not film anywhere near the university. This was not much of a problem for our group because two members were from Nottingham. It took us a while to come up with an idea. We did think of an idea where we wanted to use a room in the golf club where Phil form our group works. But that idea hit a problem, the management of the club would not let us use the golf club because we were not members of the club. So this gave us a set back then we came with a idea of having a person standing outside of a run down house that is in a nice Suburban area. This house is a few doors down from one of my group member’s house. The house was actually repossessed early on in the year because the person who owned it actually owed money to a lot of people and got his home repossessed. We thought this would be a good idea for us t use. So it was decide to use this idea, we had a problem with how to use audio so we went seek help from one of the surgeries we can go to and they reminded us that audio can be a good tool for the video.

Now that we had the idea, it meant that we had to start setting up the scene and confirm that doing the shoot at this location was feasible. So we went and took pictures of the location. We found the location was perfect it really fitted into the idea that in nice suburban area there still can be something that can tarnish the perfect exterior. We thought that the steel plates would lead the audience astray in thinking that the house is in a run council estate, not a nice suburban area. I think that this message is made clear to audience, in the way after the camera zooms out and starts to pan across the street to show the rest of the street.

Now that we knew that we were able to film at this location I produced a storyboard that depicted the shots we wanted with the camera and gave a simplistic indication of the story we wanted to portray. When it came to the day of shooting the weather looked well it was a little overcast. So we went to location and set up the camera, composed the shot, then it started to rain. This delayed us by 40minutes. After it stop the wind pick up a little. Which meant that there is a slight camera shake. I tried to counter act this by having a person stood around the camera to reduce the wind moving the camera, this was not effective. Because we only had that day to get the shot we had to go on, I would like to back to the location to retake the shot on a calmer day, but dew to the weather and time we had it as not been possible to do so.

Now that we had the Shots we needed to sort out the dialogue for the script for audio. We decided to go for a silent movie with the audio overlapping the movie sequence with the audio playing. We wanted the audio to allow the audience to gain an understanding why a person is stood outside the house. We wanted the audio to sound like a Phone call between the owner of the of the house and his mortgage company. We wanted to record the dialogue from a recorded message from a phone but found this to be quite impossible because every we put the microphone next to the phones speaker there was a interference. So we decided to plug the phone into my Mac and use a software package to capture the audio. I was not to happy with the script we came up with so during the editing process I edited the audio to remove in total 5.25 seconds. This also allowed the audio to fit perfect on the timeline of the editing suit I was using. The problem we had now was to emulate the sound of a phone call because it as a tinny sound, so I discovered the plug in “Highpass” gave the effect. With the added ring tones and dial tones. I think that the audio on the video sequence is very effective and was easy for the audience to follow.

I think the One Shot Film was a very successful project despite the set backs we had at the beginning of the project. I feel the Ideas that we have put across the narrative of story combined with the audio made it clear for the audience to under stand what is going on in the frame of the video. I would like to have produced another video sequence but dew the time this was not possible but despite that I think that it is a successful project that went well.