25th January; Lesson 2

This was the first lesson where we were given the time to focus on filming our opening. We decided it would be best to focus on one film at a time and our first one we began filming was Vertigo. Our aim was to have that opening finished by the end of that lesson so that meant we could move on a concentrate on the others and work just as productively. We used the story board that was created by Paige to guide us through each shot and we used often referred back to it to re-cap on which shot we were using and the duration of the shot. For Vertigo we filmed it in the drama room as we wanted a room with black background to make it easier when editing as in the original there was nothing else in the background. To make our opening unique we made the spiral effect by using an illusion book and rotating it to make it look as though it was moving and drew another spiral on my eyelid which we felt would save time as well as look effective. We discovered that filming Vertigo was more difficult that we anticipated. It was difficult to keep the camera steady when you are try to make only slight movements as it becomes jolted and we found ourselves having to re-do certain parts to make sure we had enough usable film when it came to our editing. We finished filmed all of Vertigo in that lesson and we had already discussed that we wanted to began filming The Strangers next.


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To be able to finish our filming and concentrate on editing we decided to use one of our free lessons and dedicate it to filming The Strangers. For this opening as we were advised to film in the school we made the houses out of Lego. we set this opening outside and put the houses down in a line. The camera was on level with the houses and we used panning to show each of them where we would later used fade to black between each house. As there was not too much to filming this opening it only took us half an hour and we found it quite simple to do compared to vertigo. As we finished earlier than expected we decided to get started on 50 firsts dates and try and film as much of it as we could in the time we had left.
In the last half an hour we managed to film the first part where we sued an image of a beach and panned across to a pineapple which then lead to a conversation between myself and Paige. It made it easier getting as much as we could filmed as then we knew we wouldn't need much longer to finish it and were confident that by our next lesson we would have finished filming all three opening sequences.