Practice making a video

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2010

11/10/2010

At the start of class today , all my group mates gathered in class on time. We borrowed the school cameras from the admin office. The script was prepared the night before online in a joined conversation and we already had a hard copy with us. We handed the script to some senior students who were free at that moment and really liked the script and agreed to act for us.

We started shooting in the alley behind school, which is a quiet narrow corridor and borrowed some items such as a cap, a gown, school bags and a register. From some of the members of the other media studies students . Working in what is popularly called, “the back alley” was fun and the actors enjoyed it as well. When that part was done, I went to check and see if the principal’s office was not too busy- the Principal had given us permission to shoot in her office earlier, but only if she didn’t have guests visiting.

Since the Principal’s office was very busy with visitors streaming in and out I chose an alternative location and talked to our admin to see if we could borrow the admin office for a little while.

The person in admin informed me that the office had a lot of work and were busy, but I persuaded him that it wouldn’t take too long for us to finish up our shooting, so he agreed. That room was comparatively very small and the main light source was unfortunately located behind the chair our character would sit on and it was difficult deciding where to place the camera as there was not much space to move and the light made things look very blurry in the viewfinder.

There was hardly 2 or 3 feet behind the desk and no matter where we placed the camera somebody’s head or toe would get cut off.

It took quite long to decide the camera location and those friends of mine who were acting for us had a class and they kept complaining that they have to leave. We took all the shots of the principal (played by a friend of ours, Zain Agha) first as he had to leave soonest. During that time the other character (played by Daniyal Qureshi) who entered the office in the start of our video had to leave so we had to cast someone else in that role (Umer Ahmed) who did a great work as well.

During the shoot there were three administration staffers working in that room and somebody’s parent was there as well, talking nonstop and we couldn’t ask her to stop talking as that would have been quite rude , so we had to wait for the parent  to go. As soon as the parent left our Principal ordered us to empty the room as the administrative staff had important work to do, so we had to leave. So although using real offices helps out some with misce en scene – it may be easier to shoot in a room where we have more space and less interruptions even if we have to work harder to make it look believable.

12/10/2010

We transferred the video we had shot on to the school computer. We had a look at it and realized that most of the camera shots were a total disaster. My group members and I went through all of the clips and discussed what should be done now. I tried to figure out a possible solution but I was also aware of the fact that we cannot manage to get all the actors we used previously together at the same time because they all had free periods at different times and what’s more the admin staff would not give us permission to occupy their office everyday. I suggested that we start working on the same clips we had shot, it can at least be a good practice of video editing and also we had promised our actors that they would get to see their video on Facebook.

I started to arrange the videos in the order we had to use them meanwhile my friends sorted out some stuff with my teacher and then we all started to select where we wanted to begin and end each clip, which was a very tough job indeed as each of us had different opinions about how long each shot should be.