R+P Post 18: Our test shoot

The purpose of the test shoot was to to find any issues in our planning or our overall idea which we could then resolve before our main shoot as after this it would be much harder to film any more shots within time restrictions. Some of the planning tools we used which had to be adapted included, the shoot board and the storyboard.

This is a sample of our shoot board

After editing our test shoot footage we encountered some issues such as a lack of purpose for the antagonist, Damien Brooks, as it was not obvious to a viewer if he was actually watching the news broadcast due to the shots we used on the shoot board. For example, we changed shot 8 on the storyboard to a close-up (as seen on the sample page to the left) as this would make the transition from the camera filming the laptop screen to a full screen of the news anchor more seamless and in turn make the audience know that this is what the antagonist is doing.


For our storyboard we had to add extra shots, such as reactions shots of the antagonist watching the news broadcast as this would make his purpose in the sequence more obvious to the audience and in turn make the resulting phone call make more sense. Some of these reaction shots included a shot of the antagonist becoming relaxed and happy when the news reporter is attacked, thus implying he is behind the attack or at least an accomplice in it; this would make the audience feel anxious and fear due to their nature of feeling remorse when someone is attacked and that in contrast this man is rejoicing in it.

When looking back on our footage I was happy with our continuity sequence towards the beginning as all the shots seemed to flow and link together well, thus making the characters movement though the house more realistic. An short clip of continuity in our sequence can be seen below.



This shot achieved all the goals we set out for it as it not only had good continuity, it also had the dim lighting we were striving for to help make the antagonist seem creepy and thus provide a gritty feel to the sequence.

However, an example of some bad shots in our sequence would be when the news anchor is listening to the news reporter speak. His reactions do not always link with the words or action of the news reporter, whilst there is a notably short time between their dialogue at one point; this in particular is very unlike an actual news report as there is usually a longer gap between speech.