Me and Meg conducted test shots with Emma a few days before filming the actual shots so we were able to know what shots we wanted to film and

familarise ourself with the camera and the tripod which we havent used since last year, we were also allowing Emma to see what we wanted her to do and allow here to understand the character we wanted to portray. We also wanted to make sure the shots would work in Megs house as the location and we could also finalise things such as costumes and camera angles.

 

On our filming day for our scenes filmed at Megs house and not the dancing scenes at school, we started out filming our first shot and did all of the following shots in cronological order, this allowed us to make sure we wouldn't of missed out any shots and Emma didn't have to change here clothes constantly. Because it was a fairly dull day we had to turn on the lights so the lighting looks artificial which we hadn't planned for although we were aware that we would have to wait 20 minutes to allow the light to get to its full brightness, which set us back timing wise a little but overall didnt make that much difference. As we all knew what shots we needed to get done from the test day we started fairly quickly and confidently. We also had to write a few letters for the film but we didn't want to show too much of the letter as it might've been very obvious the letters weren't from real people.

 

On Friday 4th December, Meg, Emma and myself, filmed the dancing part of our short film. We were unable to have a test shooting day here so we were what felt seemingly under prepared for the dancing scene shooting, not even 100% sure what area of the school we were going to use.We chose the stage for the audition scene as we felt like this is the most likely place an audition would take place. We used the schools main hall as it had a stage which we thought would be effective in this part of the story. We were also able to make the stage a bit darker so it looked more realistic as an audition. We tried to use a variety of shots including close ups on Emmas face and feet and wide shots of the whole stage. We used the tripod for most of the shots and positioned the camera on the stage and off the stage. Because we were taking the sound from the recording and replacing it with music straight onto the film we were able to play the music out of the loud speaker and let Emma dance to random snippets of the music and continue filming so the camera remained in the same position for some of the shots. As well as this, we tried to do a point of view shot from Emma's perspective however we might not be able to use this as there was no one that could watch the audition and therefore no one is in the audience. To make it more obvious this was an audition we could have had a table and judges but this might have made it look tacky. We made a number for Emma to wear as well to make it appear like an audition. The main problem with the filming was Emma's fast movements as it wasn't always easy to get Emma completely in the shot and she often dances out of it unless we move the camera fast - this then didn't look natural in the film.

 

We then wanted to change location of our filming so we were able to make it look like Emma was dancing somewhere else, for practise. The location we used was schools drama studio as it was a more casual location but had plenty enough room for Emma to dance in. We filmed Emma entering as the shot before is her walking to dance practise. We then see her getting ready to dance and we again tried to film a variety of shots of Emma testing out different dance moves. Becuase this was a practise rather than an audition we wanted Emma to mess up or make her dancing more floppy because we wanted to show her everyday dancing. We got her to change from a different outfit so it would be clear to the audince that as she wasn't wearing the same clothes as her audition, it was clearly a different place and time. 

 

After creating our rough cut and presenting it to an audience, we got feedback which suggestsed we needed to add some extra scenes to our production. The feedback told us we needed to add a scene with her mum to understand what was happening instead of simply reading the letters and not seeing a parent in the house. We returned to Megs house and managed to get Megs mum to act a short scene of her opening a letter. This improved our production however after adding this scene and showing these additions to our teachers we were told there needed to be interaction between the two characters. We were also told to add sound effects so after school we once again returned to Megs house and filmed a scene between the two characters. We tried to show different angles but we used Megs kitchen to film however the lighting sometimes looked weird so we used minimal shots. Once we finished this we filmed the noise of letters opening and keys rustling and doors opening which would allow us to add sound effects to add different effects to the product, hopefullyadding more depth to our film.