Film Opening task - Location/sound/lighting

Location

For the location we had decided that we wanted to film in both the abbey graveyard and also the graveyard that's close to the train station. This is because the major plot point in the opening is that Tessa's younger sister has gone to the wrong graveyard. Therefore, we wanted the settings to be different when filming. However, when we came to film in the evening we ran into problems at the abbey due to the bell ringing group having a practise that night until 9pm which is when we wanted to be almost finished. As this ruined our sound, we had to move to the other graveyard and just shoot from different areas so it looked distinguishable. This wasted a lot of time as the actors had already blocked out the scene by the abbey and we had to walk with all of our equipment to a different location. The graveyard that we ended up filming in did work well though, because it actually seemed creepier than the other one and it didn't really matter about the background so this sped up filming as it was all in one location.

Sound

For the sound, we didn't have any microphones to pick up the actors voices better which did decrease the overall quality slightly. We were lucky because there wasn't any wind which could have ruined the audio however the bell ringing did make the footage that we filmed at the abbey unusable. There were some issues with the facetime footage as the audio disappeared when trying to edit the screen recordings in.

Lighting

With the lighting, at first we didn't have any big lights with us as we were hoping that the lights from phone screens and torches would be enough for the actors and the setting to be visible. However, it was a lot darker than expected which meant that there wasn't enough light to pick anything up with just the lighting that we had. This meant that two of us had to go and get more, bigger lights to illuminate the location. These did work well and meant that everything happening was actually visible on the camera. For some scenes it was a bit difficult as they needed to be concealed so that they couldn't be seen on camera but generally they worked well just being on the floor a few metres away from the actors. For the facetime footage, their phone screens were effective for illuminating the actors' faces.