For our second project, we were given the task of producing
a scene of a conversation between two people. On the first day of recording the
sequence, our group was producing a scene in which consisted of a conversation
between a teacher and a pupil. This was the first time we had filmed a sequence
with the use of a microphone. It was mainly attached to me, on the back of my
collar, so I wasn't aware of how visible it stuck out in the camera footage. We
had managed to gain all the necessary footage for the scene on this day; but
only just about, as we had only left ourselves with about twenty minutes for
filming, due to spending quite a bit of time figuring out what we were doing
for the scene. The next day, when we entered the editing process, we unfortunately
discovered that no sound had been captured, due to a faulty microphone. This
meant that we had to go back out, and re-film all of the sequence.
However, we decided to use this opportunity to change it
around a bit. We had lost confidence in the scene we had done before, so we
changed what happened in it, and instead did a scene between a homosexual
couple, in which one man admitted to the other that he had an affair with
another man. We had a better idea of what we were doing as we had used the
sound equipment the lesson before, but nonetheless, we still spent too long
figuring out what we were doing for the scene, so this once again limited the
amount of time for filming. We had managed to film the scene from three
different camera positions, which consisted of the master shot, a shot of David
and a shot of me.
Our final footage was good enough visually, as we used the
tripod entirely, giving us a much steadier shot. It also helped having a third
person in the group to operate the camera, whilst the other two people
performed in front of the camera. However, the audio of the footage was just terrible;
it turned out very quiet. Even whilst turning up the speakers entirely, the
sound is barely audible. I’m not sure what caused the sound to turn out this
quiet; perhaps the microphone was not close enough to our mouths, or perhaps we
were just speaking too quietly.
When we went to edit the sequence, we imported all three
sets of footage onto the computer, and chose which parts of each shot we were
going to put into the final sequence. We then put the clips together, giving us
the full scene in one sequence, with a variety of camera positions. When the
clips were put together, we realised that the full scene turned out rather
short, so we could have done with having a longer script to also have longer
footage. The continuity turned out all right, as the transitions between each
shot changes comfortably; the only issue that I may have had with the
transitions is that two occurred in a short space of time, due to one shot
being too short.
There were two different versions of the sequence which we
produced; one featuring parallel non-diegetic sound at the end, and the other
with contrapuntal non-diegetic sound at the end. These two different sounds
both give a different mood and tone to the sequence. The parallel music during
the end gives off a quite mellow mood to the watchers, making this appear as a
sad scene of a couple breaking up, whereas, the contrapuntal music during the
end gives more off an uplifting mood to the watchers, creating a more cheerful,
or even humorous, scene.
There were improvements which we made during this project,
compared to our first project. For instance, we managed to maintain a much more
steadier shot as we had made better use of the tripod, and also had a third
person operating the camera. This time we had decided what we were doing for
the full sequence, instead of making it up as we went along, so we managed to
produce a scene which flowed quite nicely, and ended appropriately.
