Notes on Group Meetings, Re-Shoot and New Plan.

A week or two ago, my group met up at Cameron's house to shoot for our Film Noir Opening. We had a script, shot list, storyboard and good intentions; we all had a really good feeling about this shoot. 8 hours later, we'd reached a point of realisation that we were going to have to re-shoot. Shots looked really messy, we relied too much on the free-held camera technique to create a disoriented style but looking back on it, it looks shaky, rushed and amateur. Lighting was different in almost every shot, the small house was too crowded to work properly, it was hot, loud and everyone lost their prior motivation after re-watching a few of the shots.

Kira, Amy and I discussed our options in the Editing Suite after logging and capturing our work and swiftly decided we cared too much to let ourselves use this footage and it was time to re-think everything even though time wasn't on our side. Our problem was, our initial idea was too complicated, and looking back, it would have been a long, over-detailed opening for a film; it just wouldn't have worked.

We mind-mapped possible ideas, toyed with the idea of a re-shoot, consulted the missing members of our group and generally worked hard and fast to complete the video to the standard we knew we could. I think, looking back, the pressure of being so short of time and completely having to re-think our idea and possibly re-shoot was of course terrifying but it did make us work so hard and it drove us all in terms of motivation and determination to get everything down to the last minute detail.

Over the course of the next few days, storyboards, a new script, brand new treatments, call sheets, risk evaluation sheets and shot lists (examples will follow shortly in blog posts) were produced and we'd simplified our idea. We all agreed that it was much better than the original, it had a better narrative and easier for an audience to digest. We changed our blogs, got our new material on there and went for it.

Now we had all of our pre-production completed, our group met at my house to re-shoot our opening in entirety and in my opinion, things are looking far better than I think our last ideas ever could. Our shots are much more contemporary, neater and smoother, and clearer. I think the edit is going to look really nice.

(Written By The Editor: Myself, Ben Halliday)