Year 12 NEA blog: May 2019

Wednesday, 22 May 2019

The challenges I faced during filming is that I started filming too late in the day so the lighting was relatively dark, the house itself was also dark, in future I would be selective in where I film in relation to how dark the room was. If the lighting was improved, the character expressions would be a lot clearer and the mise en scene would be stronger, the scene itself would have been more aesthetically pleasing if the colour and light wasn't so dark. I also struggled to get the actors to all work together without skipping lines or laughing, I think this is a common problem with filming more than two people who aren't all necessarily good at acting. The camera I was using also ran out and the second half of the film had to be filmed on a phone, as a result there is a noticeable difference in light and camera quality between the clips. I also think there could be more variety in angles, and although I did try to do this in filming, I couldn't use half the clips because there was talking in the background or the lines were messed up. I do however think a strength of this scene is that I filmed in a location other than school, and had a range of people to be part of it. I also think that Charles, playing the prime minister, was a good actor and fit the role very well, being consistent in delivering his lines.

I used a lot of over the shoulder shots as I thought this was effective in showing the interactions and dialogue between characters, the focus of this scene in the film and in my recreation was the Prime minister being introduced to the staff, specifically to Natalie as that scene set up the plot line for their love story. I tried to switch between over shoulder shots to show characters responses although this was not successful because a lot of footage was unusable due to background noise and actors making mistakes.

There is only sound in the scene is diegetic as I did not add sound because I didn't think it would add much to the scene as the dialogue was the focus of the scene. I think the sound recorded fairly clearly although in the second half of the film it was a lot quieter noticeably, although not quiet enough that I remembered to increase audio gain. If I had used the same camera throughout the audio and quality would have been more consistent.
I didn't changed too much to the setting, the opening of the scene was outside the house like the original although I did not change much as I couldn't recreate ten downing street. I then transitioned from outside the house to inside. I positioned the actors alongside the staircase as I thought this made them look the most like servants and the house is fairly big so I thought the setting was appropriate, especially more appropriate than if I filmed it at school. I also decided to make them all wear the same hat so I could create some kind of uniform or to show they were all working for the same person. Although, I do think their outfits could be smarter and definitely could be more lighting in the setting. Additionally, I noticed that I had missed two lines at the end of the scene, although this didn't matter too much, this meant I missed out a scene where the Prime Minister sits in his office and this is a better close to the scene then the last line being from Natalie as it foreshadows their future relationship.