Week 1: Problems and Solutions & Work Produced

One of the biggest problems with this project is that I’ve never attempted something on this magnitude before. Also trying to come up with an idea for a film to make based on the title “winter” will be in some ways easy and difficult as it is quite broad. In order to combat this I will read through the brief and sort out what work I am going to be doing.

As I am going to be doing a short film for my project; I will have to do some audio recording outside. This will be an issue as it’s quite hard to record audio outside due to wind distorting the sound. To solve this I’ll try my best using a wind guard top clear up the dialogue, and I can use a directional microphone to block out some of the background noise like traffic etc, but if it doesn’t come up alright I’ll have to dub over the speech in post-production. When I am recording inside there is potential for there to be echo; so if this happens I’ll need to fill the room with soft objects to dampen the sound.

I’ll also need to make sure that my video quality is good. There is potential for the video quality to be grainy if I don’t use the right white balance setting, therefore I’ll make sure to keep checking the footage as the locations change.  I’ll need to do storyboards to plan out my shot types and framing. I will use manual focus and keep checking it so that my shots aren’t out of focus.

One problem that I am going to have with my production is that it will be based around Christmas, however as we will be filming in February there won’t be any decorations up which will be a challenge. To solve this whenever I am filming I will have to put up decorations in order to keep the continuity.

As my film will be documentary style we will be filming in public places; this can be a positive and a negative, as the public reacting to a camera being there will give authenticity to it, but the public could also disrupt the filming.

Here is my PowerPoint:
Winter Project – The Boy Who Believed

Interview:

I did interviews with random people to practice my interview skills and see if there will be any problems with recording audio.

Here are my recordings:

Winter Interviews

One big problem that I had with these interviews was a lot of background noise; a solution to this could be to take an interviewee to a quieter location than near the busy entrance to the college, however people may not want to move so I would use a cardioid polar pattern on the microphone in order to cut out some of the ambient background sounds and talking. I could also turn down the audio gain and move the microphone closer to the subject in order to eliminate more background noise.