Preproduction

There was a lot of preparation and work put into the preproduction of Virulence to make things easier whilst we were shooting and through to post production. As Pat was the producer he organised the filming schedule, the casting and organisation of the actors as well as other important details. Isaac created a shot list which details each shot we needed to get, from what angle, shot location and characters involved. This was really useful during filming but also through post production for when I was editing the project together. My involvement in preproduction consisted of booking gear for the shoot and time in the edit suites for post-production. I believe that there wasn’t much more we could do to improve our preproduction, at this stage in time I felt like we were really organised as a group and had everything under control and ready for the shoot in the following week.

Production

Going into our shoot I believed that our group was organised and on track to having a successful production, bar a few minor setbacks I believe we achieved this. Thursday night was timed really well and almost ran exactly to schedule whereas Friday was over, but in hindsight this isn’t too bad at all. One thing I believe we could of improved on for our shoot, or even beforehand in preproduction was planning the lighting better. As no planning went into the lighting it was improvised on the nights of production which was very obvious as we reviewed footage. Another thing we should of done during our production is review the footage more frequently to ensure that we have the right take which I know we didn’t consistently do all night.

Post-production

As the editor of the group, post-production was my biggest contribution to the film. A lot of problems became apparent during the edit as some shots were over exposed whilst others were under. On top of this some shots were filmed completely out of focus or shifted out of focus during the shot. This made editing the film very challenging and time consuming with most shots needing to be re-framed, all shots needing colour grading and because of the mistakes made during production the pace was really hard to gage and create. Despite this I feel like post-production could have been better if we didn’t use the edit suites for editing, the hardware in the computers is really slow and made it really difficult to export the project so that Isaac could begin sound and create the after effects on top of the project.