Production Review - Rush

Production Review - Rush

Script Writing
Writing the script was quite difficult for me, I found it challenging to get into the script and there was never a point in which I was happy with it, The feedback I was given whilst disheartening in some areas was also helpful and allowed me to make changes to improve the story, I found it difficult to show rather than tell as there are a few moments in my script where I needed to get information across with little or no way to  visually show it.

I also found it difficult to write the dialogue in different ways, such as Jason being younger I tried to write more expletives and slang into his dialogue and Daniel I tried to make him more polite and composed, however when he is angry or upset he uses expletives. Where I was putting myself in their shoes I also found that their reactions were similar. Next time I might ask others how they would react in certain situations.

Location
I had lots of issues in regards to location, I called, Emailed and asked places in person however I would either get a negative response or none at all, When I went online to Kent Film Office and applied for a location I was told I would need a location fee of a few hundred, unforunetly I did not have the funds for that.

I have previously used a location at my old college which is a roadway with heavy bushes to one side, I decided to ask them and was told it was fine. I went down there the same day to take pictures and do a location recce. However I deleted the images when I formatted my SD card for filming another project.
Actors
Actors was actually something I sorted very early on, originally I was going to get Jason Efstathiou to play Daniel and an actor I know to play Daniel, this worked since they were both around the same size and Jason can dress up to look a bit older than he is.

My filming days were the 17th & 18th of November, however the camera and equipment was needed by someone else on the 17th, I had everything planned and I didn't think it would take me more than a few hours to film so I changed the date to the 18th only.

On the 18th at 00:24 I get a text message from my actor telling me he can't film, this was quite stressful as I had 11 hours until filming and no actor, I asked around with the plan that if I couldn't find anyone I would do the part. Luckily my Dad stepped in and offered to help. Since he works in IBM he fit the role of office worker quite well.

Planning
In regards to planning I made a rough story board and a shot list, since my dad needed to leave for an hour to take my mum to work I worked around that scheduling all of Jason's individual shots in that time.

I borrowed some traffic cones from my aunt to block of the road and packed together some of my own equipment in case I needed it.

Production
I picked up Jason and Callum in the morning and got to the location a bit late due to traffic, which I need to plan for in the future, we got to the location and met up with my dad who had brought the traffic cones in his car.

We put two at each end to stop cars, even though the road was never used as it was inside the campus,  once we had this done I began filming my dads shots, which is when we run into our first two problems, the first was that the camera's batter was at half, leaving around an hour and a half of shoot time, we kept the camera turned off when we were not using it to save power and I framed up the shots with my own camera to get the look rather than using the Sony camera.



The second problem was the strong wind and heavy clouds over head. The wind mean we couldn't put up the green screen as it would blow over, however we needed the green screen to make it look like our characters were driving. To rectify this I improvised and using a expandable light reflected I was brought for my birthday, I wrapped and clamped the green screen onto it.

 This meant all we had to do was get someone to stand on the other side of the car and hold up the green screen, this had good points and bad points, the good was that it wasn't affected by the wind and also gave us much more freedom in where we set up. the downside was that it didn't completely cover the window, It would have been much better to use the big screen.

Therefore I made sure that the green screen was behind the actors head as this would be the hardest to mask and I would mask the windows by hand.

 After I got the green screen shots I then got the conversation shots of Jason and Daniel, I got a wide shot and and two over the shoulder shots since I thought Jason should be feeling trapped and stressed.

Then once we got all the shots with "Daniel" my dad left to do his errands. I then filmed all the shots I needed with Jason, at this point the battery was getting lower and lower.

When we filmed the shot at the beginning of the video the camera started to beep, indicating it would soon run out, we rushed to get the last shots, such as the key turning in the ignition. We got that shot done and a few seconds later the battery run out.

Then the rain started, It began to rain quite heavily as we packed up the equipment and put it into my car, I looked through my checklist and found I had missed out one shot of Jason fiddling with the SatNav and it falling. I decided I would film that at a later date as we didn't have any battery.

This wrapped up our shoot and I dropped Jason off and went to the studios to download the footage, onto my laptop and back it up to the hard drive.

Editing
Editing the video was reasonably easy, what I spent the most time on was the green screen, the footage of Daniel went smoothly, the keying worked and looked clean and the masking was simple and there was little to do.

Jason's footage however was a challenge, since the clouds had made the ambient light darker and even though we hadn't touched the shutter speed settings on the camera the was a lot of motion blur, which isn't good with green screens, i did my best to work with this and tried to place the cutaways and other footage over those moments and kept them short.

I also wanted to add some movement to the shots as they were both filmed on the tripod, I did this by using an expression on the footage's position called wiggle, such as wiggle(10,10) this means the footage moves ten times a second by a factor of ten pixels, I used a smaller number for Daniel to show a smoother ride and a higher number on Jason's to show a rougher ride.

To help the dialogue look smoother I used L-Cuts to have their voices overlay the next scene. When Jason is trying to turn on his engine and you hear the ignition squealing I had it carry on to the next shot with Daniel, when it cut I lowered the volume to show that Daniel could hear him having issues.

I didn't do much in the way of colour correction, I only made sure the shots looked similar in colour temperature.

What I learnt
In my next project I will make sure to get definite confirmation from actors, I will also think about location when I am writing a script, even though a road wouldn't be much of a problem the nature of a "fake car crash" put many people off, even with me explaining that the cars wouldn't even be near each other.

I will make sure the camera battery is fully charged and the memory card wiped, with the green screen I will try to find a location thats blocked from the wind and also film at a higher shutter speed so I do not get the ghosting effect.

I also learnt that improvisation is a necessary skill in the toolbox of any film maker as nothing ever seems to go as planned, If it wasn't for the idea of using the pop of reflector I would likely have not gotten the footage I needed, Being well prepared is also useful, the planning in regards to the storyboard and shot list organised the shoot, having extra equipment on hand also helped, next time I will try to think of contingencies before I start filming and plan accordingly.