Q4 - What factors did you have to take into account when planning, shooting and editing?

The main constraint that we had to work around was our time restriction because it meant that when planning, shooting and editing we had to keep in consideration the time. While we were planning we had to make sure that our ideas were achievable in the time that we had. During shooting part of my job as director was to make sure we were working to schedule and that we shot everything we had set out to. In the edit suite we only had 1 hour to produce the final product, so we had to think logically and practically about what we were going to do, how fancy we wanted it to be and what order we would edit in.

The other factor that we had to take into consideration is the location in which we were shooting. Due to the fact that we were filming in school and in school hours, we had to be careful of getting students in shots and the noise from around the school. For the majority of the hour we were shooting we did not have any major problems with location because we decided that it was obvious to the audience through the signifiers such as school buildings, that it is set in a school. But we had to be careful that our establishing shot did not become cluttered with students in the background.

Establishing Shot taken outside of the media block

Technical factors such as lighting, sound and continuity were also considered in the process of this preliminary exercise. At first we thought that it would be a good idea if we started off with the lights being turned off in the edit suite before James entered. But soon realised that this would complicate things at later stages because it would appear much darker on camera. Sound was a factor that we had to check through the headphones which was Olivia's role, because at some points we could hear people in the next room and this was not ideal for our project. We also had to make sure that we followed the principles of continuity such as match on match action, to ensure that the audience are not confused.