Synoptic Day

On Wednesday 17th March we had a synoptic day where the whole day we spent doing media work. We took this opportunity to start and hopefully finish filming.
We spent the morning of the day filming Finlay and we tried to film all of the shots of him in chronological order to make it easier when editing.

Our first job was to find a place that was watched my a camera so that we could film both Finlay and the camera monitor with him on it. We were then told that there is no cameras inside classrooms to do this. We then decided to film the shot outside as there were plenty of cameras outside we could film from and benches we could use, this also made the character more isolated and alone.

The first shot we filmed was the tracking shot of “Andrew’s” eyes, tracking backwards to reveal his body in a triangle frame. After making the frame we had to make sure it was lined up with the camera and that we could see the whole of his body at the end of the shot. We stuck the card over the camera and did test shots of “Andrew” to make sure everything was lined up right and that we could see everything we needed to. After doing this we did the shot a number of times, in different paces this was so that we could pick the best one when editing.
The second shot we did was the shot where we filmed both “Andrew” sitting on a bench with his laptop and a shot of the security camera monitor with him on it. We filmed “Andrew” on his laptop outside in different angles and we focused his finger where he would be typing frantically. We then told him to look at the camera and look like he was trying to hide something, at this time we filmed the camera monitor, where he was looking straight at the camera.
Our third shot was “Andrew” after seeing the camera packs up his bags and tries to move quickly. We had to show him packing away his laptop and bags and leaving in a hurry. But because in the other shots, his bag wasn’t there it would look wrong if his bag magically appears also it would be non continuous. So because of this reason we decided to make him just pack away his laptop and then walking away. This would give it more of continuity. We when filming him walking away, we decided to film him from to angles; because of this we had to make sure Finlay did exactly the same thing, we put markings on the floor for him to know when he should turn. We had to re take these shots a number of times as the pace of him walking differed also when he was packing away the laptop there were troubles including he couldn’t get the clip undone or papers inside the case flew away; which we had to remove.
We tried to give Finlay as much guidance and told him exactly what to do, this way if we needed to re-film anything we could do it the same. Also we all had a vision of what we wanted our opening to look like, and we wanted it to come true.

We then filmed the different triangles and cameras that we are going to have intercuts in the film. We filmed each object for 20 seconds, this is a lot more than what we are going to use, but we decided to film for a long time so that we could cut and place the part that we want to use.
We were then going to film the person drawing and colouring in a triangle really franticly. As out actress wasn’t here we had to go around asking for people to do this for us, after finding someone we got the camera and scenery set up, but the camera was out of battery, we then decided we would film this last part another day, and we would get the footage we did and start editing it.

We then uploaded out footage and began to watch the bits we did and deciding which of the shots were better and a better pace. After deciding which shots we wanted to use, we decided to call the synoptic day a day.

Overall I think that the day went well and we got nearly all of our filming done and all that we need to do is film the last shot, edit and pick some music to go with it.