production

https://youtu.be/2TsJo4HYXmY  Finished Project 

I started the production process of my project on Friday 16th October, I started with location filming, in and around Kings Lynn. I knew from the early planning stages of this project that I wanted to get some cutaways in town, in shops and in public because I knew I could get some really funny moments in public. 

For this shoot, I wore the superman costume for the first time, I had been searching around, looking at a few different costumes however I couldn't decide on whether or not I wanted a good quality costume or a poor quality one.  However after some debate, I decided to go with the poorer quality costume because it fit more to the theme of a low budget film than the more expensive costume.

Shoot Day 1

The first thing we shot was the cutaways in Kings Lynn, which included a couple of scenes outside CEX. I wanted to get a couple of shots here to show my character Clint going in to buy a copy of Justice League which was to be one of the final scenes in the sketch before Clint got fired. We did not need to gain permission to film there because we did not actually film inside CEX, however because we were filming in public, we had to be extremely careful not to include any members of the general public in shot as they had not given us consent to film them. To prevent this we made sure that the path was clear and that nobody was in the shot while we were filming around CEX. As we made sure that we prevented this, we had no problems filming here

We also filmed in Waterstones in Kings Lynn, I asked the manager of the store if it was possible to film inside their store in order to gain cutaways and he granted us permission. Once again, we made sure that we did not accidentally film anyone else inside Waterstones without their permission. Filming in Waterstones was successful and we did not encounter any issues while filming. 

We filmed down by the Great River Ooze in the Historic part of Kings Lynn, for this part of the shoot, I wanted to throw the DVD copy of Justice League into the river as the final gag in the cutaways before he ultimately gets fired. However when we got there to film this part of the sketch, We realized that we would be unable to film this part of the sketch in this particular location as the water would've been too deep for us to retrieve the copy of the Justice League once we had finished shooting. However we were able to get a couple of other shots at this location and there were no additional problems.

Because we could not throw the DVD of  Justice League into the Great River Ooze, I decided that, that scene would be filmed in The Walks as the water there is a lot shallower and I would be able to retrieve the copy out of the water once we had finished the shoot. I also got some other shots of me destroying the DVD.

Shoot Day 2:

The second day of shooting was the first day we filmed in Springboard studio, I enlisted the help of Jay and Tristan to help me. Jay was going to operate the camera and I had cast Tristan to play the character of Tom Cranston, the director. 

Originally, I was going have another character in the sketch called James, who would have been Co-directors with Tom for the film. However the character seemed fairly unnecessary as they did not add anything more to the story,  so James were ultimately cut from the script and all of James' scripted lines were rewritten for Tom. 

In this scene, I hoped to include a reference to the infamous Henry Cavil mustache that was horribly removed from his face in Justice League. In this scene, I was hoping to be able to wear a fake mustache however I was unable to buy a fake mustache in time, so that part of the scene was ultimately cut as well  

 We filmed the largest scene on the second day of filming, In this scene is where we see the Superman suit for the first time and Clint is not best pleased, We also see that Clint has rewritten the script to make it more dark which annoys Tom.  

This was quite a difficult scene to film because the camera has to be moved a lot with lots of difficult angles and shot types for this scene. So to make sure that it was perfect , We did multiple practice runs with the camera off, in order  so we could block out the scene so Jay would know where the camera needs to be angled and for him to also learn his queues to know when he would need to pan/tilt the camera. 

Once we had completed our practice shoots, we began filming properly and we had no other additional shooting problems and I was very happy with the footage I acquired.

Day 3:

On the final day of shooting, I wanted to film the last of the cutaways and the talking head interviews that for both Tristan and myself. For one of the cutaways it is a shot of Clint walking down the corridor  with the camera following him, This was fairly easy to film however the lighting changed drastically from one part of the hallway to the other. However this was not a concern as I wanted everything to be natural and realistic so we did not need to re-shoot due to this factor. 

This was the same approach I used when we filmed in the studio for the talking heads,  I did not set up any lighting because I wanted it to look as low budget and unprofessional as possible, and I feel that this comes across well in the final edit. 

There were no problems on the last day of shooting and I was once again very happy with all the footage I had acquired so I was ready to begin the post production process 

Editing:

When I began the editing process, I already had a rough idea of how I wanted the story to play out and the only thing that I was uncertain of was where the cutaways would go? This was because the cutaways were improvised so they were not included the original script. I decided that I would put all the ones filmed in town together in order to film some sort of montage towards the end of the sketch.

The editing process did not really cause me any problems. It was fairly straight forward for me, however I decided to put gaps in between scenes, I added these breaks and integrated them into the story at the end of each part would be the end of each day of filming in the sketch. This was to allow for more of a flow to the sketch and to make it feel like more of a story than just a collection of clips. 

I decided to not add any non diegetic sounds like music or sound effects. However during one of the scenes filmed in Kings Lynn we used the Superman theme and I decided to keep this in because it was digetic and also it was clear and loud enough to use without having to re add it in during post production. 

The only graphic I used was at the beginning as I decided I wanted this to be a "lost footage" and I wanted that to be clear to the audience so I used a graphic as a preview card to show this to the audience 

 

After receiving some feedback, I decided to change the colouring of one of the scenes, even though it was natural lighting I decided to correct the colour because a few people thought it was too dark. I only altered it a little bit and I was satisfied with how it looked. 

From the feedback I received, I did not need to change anything else of my edit and I was very happy with my final edit.