Shots that were not included/Crow enigma shot changes

As I has explained in a previous post that we would use a shot of a group of crows because it is called a murder. This seemed like such a good idea and would create another enigma. We thought we could include this because it would be a simple job of finding a group of crows and filming them. But we found out that it was very hard. We had been told that to get into the top mark ban we need to have steady camera movement so this made it even harder for us to film crows. To start of with is too hard to actually film the crows. Firstly we couldn’t find any, the only time we saw them whilst we had a camera was after being asked to leave the abandoned house we originally planned to use. This was on a cricket field near Brentwood High Street. It was private property so we couldn’t go on but when we did set up the camera and zoomed in on them they moved around and eventually flew away. We decided that it was not a major part of our thriller and wouldn’t necessarily need to be included in the first 2 minutes and did not include it. Looking back it seems like the best thing to do because it was very time consuming and to hard to actually shoot. It did save us from wasting a lot of time but would have been very good to include.

The second shot that we had planned out but did not use was the shot that I had made a wedge for. We did not use it because the out come wasn’t good enough. When we decided to go ahead and use this shot because it would be vey effective we were thinking of a shot where the pills fell directly on the plastic which was hovering over the camera and then scatter over the floor. Once we had set it up and actually had it in action we had problems of getting the pill box and all of the tic tacs to fall in the same place in the correct spot. The first shot failed because the tic tacs got stuck in Tom’s hair but that could be changed. The second shot we just had problems of actually getting the tic tacs to fall in the right place. It was a lot harder than it seemed when we were planning it. On our third attempt the pill pot rolled across the plastic back and forth. Personally I thought that would have been good at the time but the rest of my group disagreed, just as well because when we edited it looked awful. Eventually we had a shot where we were all happy in that the pills looked like they were scattering on the floor directly under the camera.

When we were editing our footage we found that the quality of the shot was very poor because the plastic that was being hovered over the camera for the pills to fall on got very dirty. This gave a blurred image that didn’t look very professional. Another problem that we found whilst editing was we could see the movement and reflections in the plastic. As it got a little bit dirty every take you could see it jolt and move around. This was highlighted by the fact we could see a reflection of the screen on the camera in the shot. We decided that if we included this in our thriller it could instantly loose marks. We tried to crop the footage but because it was within the main action of the shot it was pretty much just an empty screen. This was not how we wanted it and decided to abandon the idea of this shot and replace it with the character in the background of the hanging shot running away from something. This worked very well because it was obvious that the character Taylor’s played had dropped the pills from previous shots and the fact he was eating them of the floor afterwards.

Bradley Hart