Transitions: Shoot Day 1

The first shoot day was a success overall, and although the hotel room location we organised wasn’t as big or luxurious as we originally intended for the scene, we were still able to use it for free and the manager was very nice and accommodating towards us.
Me, Jack and Connor arrived early to set the equipment up and drop everything off as there wasn’t enough room in the car for all the equipment and to pick Andy up from the station. We picked Andy up and took him to the hotel just in time for Alex to arrive. We introduced the tow and did a quick line block. This was a good way for them to practice lines and also get to bounce each-other.

Trying to set the white balance 
We had some small technical issues at the beginning; the hotel room lighting wasn’t very good to work with; the shots looked very orangey. We tried adjusting the white balance which didn’t really help that much as it looked too blue. We resorted to adjusting the color Kelvin which helped but overall we took a lot of time sorting the camera out to accommodate the lighting. I really wanted the shots to look clean because it makes it easier to play with color in post. If the original filming is clean then we can do more with it. Its also better to have more light then no light; cameras operate of light so being overexposed can be fixed in post, being underexposed can be very tricky without losing quality and picture noise/grain was something we wanted to really avoid if we could. 


Rigging Up
Once we were all set up for lighting, sound and picture we were good to go. Something me and Jack learned from he third year shoot we helped out on was how much battery the Tascams drain, and how handy it is to carry a pack of batteries. We brought some batteries for this shoot which didn’t work as well as we had hoped. The batteries kept draining rapidly and we got through sixteen overall, which was ridiculous and we need to invest in a power bank when shooting for third year. A power bank is a better solution (preferably one with two usb ports) as they can take multiple charges. This was recommended by Ferg and something I will consider for my final third year project.  
The shoot went very well and the eye zoom filming was easy to do and didn’t take much time to set up thanks to our practice test shoot. We did have some issues with contra zoom; the contra zoom is typically used in horror and would be good in adding tension and a buildup of drama. When the door knocks I want dit to be dramatic. The following is a bit of research I did when looking into the contra zoom before filming: 




The issues we had was the way the camera would struggle at refocusing when pushing the camera forward on the tripod and zooming out. It would never focus properly and this took a fair few attempts. In hindsight it would've perhaps been worth practicing this technique whilst testing the eye zoom. 

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