Problems with our filming and coursework.....

We encountered at lot of problems when filming and editing our coursework... One of the main problems was that the day we arranged to film it rained, we liked the effect of this as it went with the horror genre, it meant however that we all got very bad colds! Thank you Luke and Lucy so much for standing in the rain for two hours!!!

Another problem we found out when we were editing was that the strawberry covered umbrella we used to shield the camera from the rain was in some of the shots (mainly the hand held tracking shots, e.g. where we run after Lucy). We were being extra careful to protect the camera and if we hadn't used an umbrella the camera may have been damaged. This was major a disadvantage of filming in the rain, and although we tried to keep the umbrella out of the shots, in the hand held sections it was much more difficult.

Sound was another big problem. We want Luke to whistle as he walked away from the crime scene, creating a spooky atmosphere, but due to the rain you can't hear him. To fix this we recorded a blank shot of the ground whilst Luke stood next to the camera and whistled into the microphone. In editing we managed to overlay the audio, splitting it from its original shot and it worked out great!!!

We had originally planned to have Lucy screaming as she ran away from Luke, and again as she was murdered, however even though it was raining there were lots of people about walking their dogs, and as we didn't want to scare them (and make them think something other than our filming was going on!) we decided to not have any screaming.

Another problem was the dialogue. In our script we said that we were going to have speech before Lucy was killed, however because of the weather conditions we decided against this on the day. In 'The Day Before' scene there is dialogue when Lucy is on the phone, however the camera doesn't pick this up as she is so far away. If we had time to further improve our work we would do the same as we did with Luke's whistling, have Lucy stand next to the camera and say the lines and then split the audio in the editing. Also when Luke is on the phone you can hear him say 'found her' but as his voice is so low it is heard to hear. We would also improve this if we had the time.

We chose to only have diagetic sound because of a previous experience with using a sound track and the problems it caused us. We thought that having only diagetic sound would add realism to our opening two minutes and therefore make them seem scarier. Also because we wanted to hear Luke's breathing in one shot and the whistling in another we would have to be constantly changing the soundtrack - we felt that our film would work better without it. The good thing about the rain was that it gave a good effect, the umbrella helped with this as it made the rain seem louder on our film. The diagetic whistling gives the opening an eerie effect as Luke whistles a child's nursery rhyme (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) which, by making something so familiar seem sinister, makes the audience uncomfortable. Also the heavy breathing shows the audience that Luke is following Lucy, adding to the building tension.

The last shot is very shaky as it is hand held and is meant to show Luke following Lucy out of the road. We wanted to include this to disorient the audience and make them feel uneasy as the "murderer" follows the "victim". This also builds tension. We have used a number of hand held shots to try and create this effect through out the two minutes.