Filming the video

The previous friday, we booked out a camera for us to use for this filming session. We ordered:
- Camera (P100)
- Shotgun Microphone (required 1 AAA battery) - These type of microphones are good because they are the most highly directional, and used for professional recording
- Softie - This is useful as it stops the wind interrupting the audio when filming outside

We collected these on this monday, and set off to film. We went to Jon's house first to set up and test the camera equipment. When filming, the focus, and white balance must be checked. These can be controlled on the camera itself. To white balance the camera, means, you have to use pure white, instead of picking up other white's in view. To do this, a sheet of A4 paper, which is pure white, must be held up to the camera, focused on, and the white balance button must be pressed. Once this is done, we noticed the colour we saw through the camera greatly improved, and gave a better picture.
We decided since it was 2pm, we must make use of the light, so we decided to film the bottle bank scene first. We gathered the equipment, helped by Becky and Helen, and took it to the bottle bank on _______ road. Once we had chosen an appropriate angle to film at, and once Ed was prepared with his white lab coat, and waxed hair, we could film. We gave roles of Jon to direct, with me semi-directing and giving my opinion on what looks best. Because Ed was a TV and Film 3rd year student at the University, he was able to help us know what we were doing as well, since we hadn't filmed since year 1 of our course. A couple of practice runs, and Ed learning his lines, and we were able to film. Because Ed either got distracted or forgot his lines, we had to do many takes on getting the filming right. We also had distractions behind us, as it was now the time of day the school children finished, and they were gathering behind and shouting at us, asking what we were doing. Luckily, they didn't distract us too much, and soon moved on, thus allowing us to film the rest of the bottle bank scene. My other role whilst filming was to hold the microphone, which was plugged into the camera, with the softie on top, to avoid the wind affecting the audio. I had to hold the microphone, so it was just off screen, so that Ed (Dr Colm Beeny) could be heard clearly. I had to make sure the microphone was held as still as possible as any movements would make a noise and ruin the audio. We tried two different shots, a medium shot, for most of the scene, and when Dr Colm Beeny had to place a glass bottle in the bin, we used a close up shot, to show the bottle going in the hole in the bin. This looked effective. Although students should know how to recycle glass, this was just an extra scene we added, to prove that there were bottle banks around Portsmouth.

After filming, we packed up and headed back to Jon's house. We immediatly got to work to setting up the recyclable materials and non recylable materials that we had collected and brought to Jon's last week. After a short break, Ed was back in place, and we began filming his lines. Due to us not including every fact from the leaflets that we recieved in the script, we gave Ed the job of 'ad-libbing' his role as Dr Colm Beeny, as he seemed to do well at that, and was entertaining for us watching and filming him. This added to the cheesyness and entertainment value of our film, which is exactly what we wanted.

After a lot of takes, and getting lines right, we finished filming, and found it took just over 3 hours to film everything, which we were impressed with. We sat down, watched the tape back, and approved! All the scenes apart from one scene in the lounger were filmed, and we had a thought that this scene could be animated in flash to give a bit of diversity, and I said I wouldn't mind doing the task as I was good at using Flash. The other point that we didn't follow exactly to the script was not showing the wheelie bin and the recyclable materials going into the bin. We decided that Dr Colm Beeny should just throw down the materials in anger, as his role was a character on Community Service, which he was not meant to be happy with doing. We thought it was necessary to show the wheelie bin, so we will just animate this, so the materials appear in the bin. Now the filming was finished, editing could be started.