2nd Shoot Day

After shooting the footage in Grindleford, our group decided it was best to film another similar sequence in a different location to help form a narrative whilst also addressing all of the cinematography techniques we needed to include in the final film. We decided to film in a house at night time, to help the realism regarding the thief stealing something whilst also explaining why someone is following him. We also used a house to do an interior lighting change to give continuity to the exterior one we did in Grindleford surrounding the bag.

I planned the opening shots for this small sequence, which ultimately is the start of the film, and the group supported my decision to introduce some of the elements straight away.

The main element I wanted to get across at first was a small POV sequence with the thief looking into houses. This is because it makes the audience instantly identify with this character and want to find out what he is doing, which is what we wanted the audience to do straight away. I used a mixture of  static wides, mids and close ups to get this desired effect, following a narrative control template from Film Directing : Shot by Shot : Visualizing from concept to screen (1991) by Steven D. Katz.

I also wanted to introduce one more element into this sequence so I built upon the already existing colour element, the red hoodie on the thief, and we shot next to a street light which gave off a strong red light which contrasted with the bright lights of cars going by. The reason for this is to show the danger surrounding this character and that they are not to be trusted, which is highlighted by his questionable actions.

Finally I planned a sequence shot time lapse outside the house to transition the narrative to one location to the next. This required me filming for 45 minutes as the sun rose outside the house and then compressing it in the edit to about 25 seconds long.

This shot also served as an exterior lighting change used as a narrative device.

After my sequence the rest of the group planned their shots to support the narrative. We had another sequence shot inside the house of the thief looking around a room and finding the bag, waking the stalker up as he left which set up the sequence and plot for the Grindleford section.
We did encounter some problems when filming this section of the film, mainly to do with under exposure and gain due to the time it was recorded and the camera we used (Canon 305). Some shots really struggled to be exposed with the practical light we had, mainly outside, so we used the gain on them but this main the shots very visually noisy which effects the quality of the final film overall. However that was the only negative point we really had with this second shoot, and we hope both parts of the documentary will fit well together and make a decent film.