From mid April, myself and the team have been gathering footage to work with for our short film. However due to the set backs with actors and so on (mentioned in a previous post), we’ve had to act out the short film ourselves. This blog post will be focused around how I think the team communicated throughout filming and how well we managed to plan shots and capture footage.
Originally we had planned to film quarter of the way through March once the actors had been recruited; of course this ended up not being the case and we had to scrap the idea of filming with actors entirely. This led us to star in the film ourselves: the cast being members of the group and classmates who were kind enough to act for us in between working on their projects (thanks guys!). So now we had myself playing the main character: James Jones, Dan (from our team) as James Jones’ work colleague, Andrew as Mr Johansen, Allan as the Psychopath/ evil reflection and Daniel as the Thug. Obviously to fit the script around the cast we had to make some minor and some major changes to the script: minor changes such as the thug beating the character up with his fists instead of stabbing him with a knife and some changes as big as taking an entire act out due to time limitations and the submission build deadline, this being the 23rd of May.
Overall I believe that filming went quite well and to be honest there were only slight issues we had during filming. Most of the time it was audio issues such as us filming on the green screen whilst a class was underway or even if it was just the audio that was being captured by the camera was bad. Sometimes issues came up in post with footage that we had to work around in post but I will talk about that in a moment.
However throughout the whole of the filming process, Jacob had captured a tonne of footage that he created a BTS for every filming day. He then compiled all of them together to create a 20 minute long documentary which you can view down below. As well as the considerable amount of paperwork that has been completed, this also contributes to our documentation. In the video you can see how we went about filming and there’s even a QnA segment with myself, discussing certain aspects of the filming process and more. Big thanks to Jacob on this documentary and be sure to check it out below.
With filming out of the way, it was time to review the footage. Despite the filming process being long we did have a lot of takes to choose from, so when it was time for editing the clips together we could have a better understanding of what we should use and what we should leave out. For instance we would discard takes of us laughing or just simply not doing actions correctly. 
But going over the footage, we did manage to capture some pretty good shots and the majority of our footage looked pretty nice and I think with this my directing of the shot supervisor and rest of the crew, in some instances, really helped to give some shots a unique and satisfying look to them. For instance this scene where the main character is walking along the bridge.
But we did in fact encounter some issues. These were mainly issues in post. For example some scenes looked incredibly grainy due to the lighting being low and the ISO on the camera being cranked up as a result, therefore causing the grainy look; we even encountered some issues where some shots were the polar opposite and were over exposed, sometimes causing light to over power the subject or camera in terms of lighting. Another issue was that there was too much motion blur in some pieces of footage, this was an issue for tracking mainly as sometimes the tracker would be thrown off position in After Effects whilst tracking an object or person. This was due to the shutter speed being slow which as a result created more motion blur when the subject or camera was moving.
Reflecting back on the filming dates, I think that there is definitely room for improvement if we were to do a project like this again. For instance, I’d make sure that the shot supervisor was fully aware of what they were doing before starting and were fully educated on the basics of cameras, ISO and shutter speed, therefore giving shots a more polished look and making thinks easier to track in post. I would also make sure that we had the right equipment. What i mean by this is perhaps a microphone for better audio quality and different types of tape for markers so that the actors knew where they were going to be in the next scene and so on.
Despite our issues, we did manage to pull off some pretty nice looking shots and the filming days were certainly a good experience and I think the team handled themselves well and we all communicated great: especially with our fellow classmates/ actors. Now time to put everything together and make some VFX!
Josh CG-Next Gen Blog 