Analysis of Filming - Part 1

This weekend I started filming the first part of my teaser trailer, ‘Virus’. Filming this was harder than I expected and a lot of preparation was involved just to set everything up. The first take was of Tom and Jade hugging and Jade saying ‘You’re back’. I had to do about 4 takes of this because it was very hard to position the tripod correctly, and when I zoomed in with the camera for a close up shot it looked unprofessional. I also tried holding the camera but the frame was shaking when I watched it afterwards. My next frame was of Tom looking unwell and Jade puts her hand on Tom’s forehead and says: ‘I think you’re coming down with something’. I decided to change this shot to Tom sitting on the floor and then looking up and Jade saying: "You don't look so good". I did this because my original idea did not work on camera, it looked unprofessional and my camera had to be hand held so the frame was very shaky.

New Shot: 'You don't look so good'



The next take was of Tom smashing a plate on the floor and shouting “Leave me alone!” This was the most difficult take of the day as it was very hard to make the ‘smashing’ look professional. I also changed the line from ''Leave me alone!'' to ''Stay away from me!'' as I thought this was more agressive and befitted the character of Tom much better. I tried to do this in two separate takes, but it didn’t work well at all. I shot this take about 8 times trying to get it right, but it ended up looking comical rather than scary. Therefore I had to think of something else that was similar, but just as scary. I decided that I was going to have ‘Tom’ pointing at the camera looking enraged and screaming “stay away from me!” This was a good alternative to my brother smashing plates on the floor.
Here are some 'bloopers' from my filming. This one was one of many takes from the third scene in the trailer where Tom was originally supposed to say: "Leave me alone!" and smashes a plate. As mentioned this scene idea was changed to Tom pointing at the camera and shouting ''Stay away from me!'' This clip was not put into my trailer as my brother looks as if he is about to laugh; it took some time for him to be composed and serious.



Here is the 'serious' shot that was good enough for use in my trailer:



For this shot I decided to come closer for a 'head and shoulders' shot of my brother as I thought it was more aggressive and intimidating. I also asked him to step towards the camera as he pointed his finger as if he is going to hit someone for that menacing feel.

Editing -

I had learnt some editing skills in class, so I had a good idea of what I was going to do to start off. The program I used to edit my trailer was Corel Video Studio.
I wanted the first shot to seem like a distant memory and I didn't want the audience to see the two main protagonists clearly at first. Therefore I decided to distort the image. I did this by going into Editing > Focus > Blur. By doing this the clip of film was now blurred but the voice of my actor could still be heard very clearly.
For my second shot of Tom looking up and Jade saying, 'You don't look so good', all I needed to do was to cut down the clip accordingly like so:



Blurring the image:



I also added a black out at the end of my second shot too:



I also decided to add the caption: 'Nothing is more important than Family' before my first shot as it sets the shot up better for the audience. After my first shot I added in the two other captions: 'But sometimes...' 'People Change.' I did this by selecting 'Title' at the top and then choosing an apropriate font. After these two captions I added in the second shot of Tom looking up and Jade saying: 'You Don't Look So Good'. I also trimmed down this clip as shown before and added a blackout at the end.
I added the subtitles like this:
(The font I used was Footlight MT Light)





In keeping with my original plan, I added in the Lionsgate logo at the beginning; this was not difficult at all, it was just a case of finding the right image, which I got from the internet; then all I had to do was click File > Insert Media File into Timeline > Insert Image and then all I had to do was choose the image I wanted from My Pictures Libary. The image was automatically transferred to the timeline and I dragged it to the beginning of the trailer and added a blackout after it.







I will resume filming more of my trailer next weekend; all the filming and editing took 5 hours in total and I currently have 19 seconds of film.