Organisation of actors |

As you know, filming our final cut took place on Monday evening, as this was the only date which we could get our child actress (Willow) to film for us. Although myself and Esther were fully prepared for filming, and the actual process of us filming went without a hitch, as we managed to get all of the shots we wanted (minus the camera dying half way through our filming), we had one rather large problem. This occurred once we had started filming with our camera, a Canon which we had hired from school. After taking a few shots with this camera, we watched back what we had recorded and noticed there was something inherently wrong with what we had filmed, everything had a yellowish tinge to it.

Given the fact we had filmed in daylight, with the blind in my room open for our rough cut, we thought that perhaps this issue might be due to lighting, as filming our Final Cut took place at night. In order to attempt to resolve this, we adjusted the lighting, with the dimmer switch in my room, also seeing what it looked like when we added extra lighting from lamps, torches, fairy lights etc. After doing so, we soon realised that the problem we had was not due to the lighting in the room but due to the camera itself.

Having used a Nikon to film last time, we were slightly ignorant to how to fix the Canon camera; nevertheless we both attempted to google our issue in order to look for a resolution. We tried the Canon website help page and looked at several Youtube videos amongst other things in order to help us, but to no avail. Eventually we decided that the best thing we could do would be to go ahead and film our piece and hope that we could alter the quality of our filming once it had been uploaded for editing. This is what we continued to do, working in to the night to re-shoot our film opening.

The next day, I went in to school to upload the videos from the camera SD card to a computer and begin to piece together our final cut on Adobe Premier Pro. Once i had uploaded all of the clips to the computer, to my dismay we noticed that their quality was no better than it had been whilst we were filming. Again, I tried to resolve this by playing around with the filters Premier Pro offered, in the hope that by adding filters to our filming it might appear more naturalistic and less Yellow. However, this also did not work and I began to loose hope, as when looking at what we had filmed I noticed that the shots did not only have a Yellow-ish tinge to them, but they had a grainy quality and were often out of focus. Yellowy final cut 1 yellowy final cut 2 Yellowy final cut 3

As soon as our Media teacher entered the school, I asked him for advice, spending a further hour and a half trying to resolve the problem. Eventually, Esther was able to meet me in the Media department, and the three of us contacted the School’s technician via text to ask if she was aware of what the problem was. Luckily, she was able to help us and inform us that there was probably a problem with the camera settings. We then sent her images of what we had filmed in both our rough and final cuts, from which she further identified what the issue was, informing us that it was an issue with the white balance of our camera.

Despite all of this being extremely helpful, we still had a further problem- we could not restore the footage we had already shot, nor could we find a date when Willow was free to film it all again before our deadline. Thus, we had only one option, to use the shots we already had of our child actress from our Rough Cut, drafting in some parallel editing to our piece of the child’s mother, which would be shot once I had fixed the camera

Here are some photographs that I have taken during the filming of our second rush, depicting both the props and setting which were used. Though what was filmed will not be exactly the same as our final piece, many of the props we have used here (such as the tea set) will be used again in our film opening. Filming this rush has also allowed us to recognise that other props, such as the bear will need to be changed in time for the filming of our rough cut.

Filming for this second rush took approximately 2 hours, with a little extra time to set up the tea table and select the appropriate props, the rush was filmed again on my Panasonic camera, with the aid of the mini tripod. In this rush, my sister acted several times, moving the tea party equipment around accordingly (her face was not visible, and so she was able to act in place of our child actor). Overall, the filming process ran smoothly and many extra shots (other than the ones on our storyboard) were taken, in the hope that we will be able to assess this part of our narrative and see which shots work best when filming the child setting up her tea party.