Throughout this week, my group cemented our script and ideas and officially began production. On Monday’s class we began to film. We started by filming the most complicated scene; the scene where Max is almost hit by a car (this took many takes), the filming location of which is shown below.
we followed general conventions for filmmaking, as well as Gillian McIver’s (who attributed research to Angela Dalle Vacche) (2021) concept of mis-en-scene within filmmaking as a medium. In accordance with McIver’s quote;
“In addressing the relationship between visual art and cinema I am following Angela Dalle Vacches method in Cinema and Painting (1996) which she describes as an ‘intertextual’ approach, ‘a broad category of analysis with overtones that range from narrative to stylistic detail’ enabling ‘thematic contrasts iconographic similarities and historiographic commentaries’ (Dalle Vacche 1996: 3).”
We paid particular attention towards artistic and meaningful framing and continuity in reference to this research, even so far as memorising what hand Harper was holding his phone in throughout different shots. We wanted to accentuate our narrative and thematic meaning via careful consideration of framing, camera field of depth and as mentioned, mis-en-scene. On Wednesday’s filming session I worked on audio; I learnt a lot about the value of a boom mic in comparison to a regular smaller microphone, and had both a lot of fun and difficulty trying to record the sounds of a car hitting Harper without getting my footsteps in or the levels being too loud. In accordance with research by Hilary Wyatt and Tim Amyes (2024), I considered the importance of timing when partaking in audio production. As Amyes quotes “…few audio workstations cannot currently import video – here a separate video machine has to be synchronized to the system. The format is not too significant: all that is important is that it can support timecode and be successfully interfaced”.
Through Amyes’ note of the importance of synchronising both visual and audio due to current technical limitations, I found that timing my recording with the immediate acknowledgment of “Action!” helped editors to synchronise sound and video footage recorded separately. I believe sound is a very underrated component within film(2021), and hence it was important to me to do as many takes as necessary in order to gain consistent audio levels for everything recorded (as a fun behind the scenes tidbit, this entailed even hiding behind Harper’s fence in the wet grass at one point).
I ultimately found it a very valuable experience and look forward to showcasing our finished product in the coming weeks.
References
– McIver G. (2021) Scenography and Art History : Performance Design and Visual Culture, Bloomsbury Publishing, USA
– Wyatt H., Amyes T. (2024) Audio Post Production for Television and Film : An Introduction to Technology and Techniques, edition number 3, Taylor & Francis Group, UK.
– Lampel J. D., Walls W. J. A. (2021) ‘Hollywood studio filmmaking in the age of Netflix: a tale of two institutional logics’, Journal Of Cultural Economics, 45(2):213-238,DOI:10.1007/s10824-020-09379-z.