Shooting Today!!!
Well today was the day that we got to start filming! Our first location was on our doorsteps! The Riley Lounge. This location is well lit and spacious; it has good harmony when it isn’t filled with customers.
When we got to the location I got down to setting the JVC and making sure that the shot was sufficiently lighten. We came to the conclusion while at the scene that lights will not be needed as the lounge was already well lighten and we wanted to create a natural feel.
The tripod was being dodgy; it was our bad luck to get the tripod that has the jerky head. This problem made my job as camera operator harder as the tripod was not help in stabilising shots. I was able to quickly fix this problem with some trust blutac 
the vibration was reduced with movement and the shot became more fluid in later takes.
The camera settings were a breeze as reading the camera manual the night before on
http://dl.owneriq.net/7/761742c9-b6d6-4473-a07e-0e2ada5c8128.pdf
helped dramatically.
I was able to remember how the menus were structured which made my work more fluid and what I call FlowMotion.
Overall I was able to take orders from the director with ease and I even had a friend from home observe me while on the shoot. She was impressed with how professionally our team worked and even asked if she could come along to the final shoot. The shoot consisted of me doing the “zoom out” shot 4 times over to get it right and allow for some freedom in the edit.
On our shoot one problem that I found was that the lounge had too much ambient noise coming from both electrical kitchen equipment and the constant chatter of the punters. This made me loose moral for a moment before I had to re gain control of my emotions. I have a problem with trying to make things perfect, from this shoot I learnt that sometimes you have to just go with what you have as time is more precious and costs money to be worrying about things when it’s too late. Next time I will have to keep in mind that the sound may be different on the day of the shoot to when the location was first observed. Another problem was when the lights in one of the offices cut of at the Riley Lounge killing the shot. We tried to fix the problem but no solution was able to arise as the office was locked and was out of hours. The shoot had to continue!
Our second location was very suited to the pub scene it was literally 2 roads from Ellen Terry, a 3 minute walk. It was quite for us when we got there and the staff were wonderful and let us take control of the whole environment. while the shooting took place I allowed Aaron to take lead an allow me to take some still while the film was being shot. I realised that the shutter from the DSLR was very load in the scenes we had captured. So i decided to make use of the zoom and take photos from a distance. The lighting in the room was dark so i had to play with the Aperture and Shuter Speeds to get a clear beautiful image. Jambo was one of our actors, he came along with a pint and a packet of banter!
Our team worked well together even though we had never spoken to each other before this project. I learnt that I am able to work with people of all kinds of attitudes and opinions. Even though we had many ideological clashes our team was high spirited and worked smoothly under pressure. I learnt that taking orders from people doesn’t make you small; it makes you a bigger person because the instructions are only there to help me succeed and produce a near perfect piece of work. Working with this group has been highly valuable to me, it has helped me open my eyes up to the ability of people and not always wanting to do everything myself. I learnt that the power of 5 brains is defiantly stronger than that of a lone young man from South London also known as “The Gaza”.
