Have you fed the fish?

From the given script to ‘Have you fed the fish?’, myself Josie, Tom and Sam story boarded our idea keeping in mind the shots we wanted to try before thinking about using them for our opening sequence. This included a over the shoulder shot and continuity editing of someone opening a door and walking through it from both sides. 

The first problem we encountered was the narrative. Although we were given the script we tried to think to far out the box however this was swiftly overcome as we decide we would make the scene ‘shifty’. 

Once deciding on our location, we all went down to a local park to film our sequence. Although the park was not as we had expected and we had not accounted for other people being there, we started filming our story boarded sequence. This taught us that although we may story board a shot the location may not match the shot intended. For example we planned to do a shot of someone opening and closing a gate however there was no gate only a gap in the railings. This taught us to think on or feet and use the location to adapt our shots and also to account for this sort of thing happening when filming our opening sequence. 

Another problem we encountered was that the camera we had been supplied with, unknown to us, didn’t record sound. To overcome this problem, during editing, we decided to use subtitles to allow the audience to follow the narrative. Although it was not planned it was still and effective way to portray the plot and for us to achieve the intended atmosphere. 

This task enabled us to try out different shot types and decide which looked effective and we would want to include in our opening sequence. It also gave us an idea of working in a group. Luckily we worked well in our group and this helped with sharing ideas and therefore we were able to work efficiently and quickly. We discussed and allocated ourselves to our strengths although we did take it in turns to film some of the shots in order to give everyone a chance. Hopefully working to our strengths will show in our opening sequence.  

The task also gave us a chance to test our time management. We only had a limited amount of time to film this sequence between lessons. It helped that we had our shots panned before. This is something we will take into account when story boarding our opening sequence as we don’t want to miss out a shot. The preliminary task also made us realise that we need to take into account the time of day that we are filming as it can gets dark quite quickly. 

We did encounter some problems during the preliminary task but we can take these problems onboard and try to prevent them from happening in our opening sequence.