Shooting a Dialogue Sequence

This workshop/practice was split into two sessions; filming day and editing day - quite simply, we first got into groups and filmed a short sequence with dialogue, then proceeded to edit the footage together. 

Filming the sequence

As a whole, this filming process was unfortunately not my best work and was riddled with mistakes, I wasn't fully thinking through the structure of what I was filming and I suppose I was more focused on getting it done in time.

My group was assigned the editing suite to shoot in, then we had to quickly come up with a simple idea to film - I'd consider this as my first mistake as I overcomplicated the scene a bit, we ended up with just one girl trying to turn a device on, then another one coming in and offering to help; this sounds fairly simple, but shooting both of their faces separately as well as the device whilst obeying the 180 degree rule, particularly within our time limit, ended up being slightly tedious.

We made sure to set up our shots according to what we learnt in the camera workshop, even though I still ended up not pulling them off at all;

• I attempted to set up a 180 degree line to shoot this sequence in, although I think I ended up pushing the boundaries of either end of the line a little too far as the shots ended up contrasting each other a lot - to the point where the girls ended up actually swapping sides in a shot in an attempt to film a more interesting take, which completely defeated the purpose of this rule. 

• Throughout filming I find I was more concerned with getting both of the girls visible in the shots rather than attempting to frame the shots in a more interesting way using the Rule of Thirds, although the more simplistic framing I took on consisted of one girl in the lower left and the other in the upper right corner, resulting in a somewhat more fulfilling composition.

• Another mistake of mine was failing to set up the camera's setting appropriately as the exposure was much too low, resulting in very dimly lit shots, which oddly enough is something that I am usually confident in, so perhaps it was just that the location was too dark to properly judge whether the camera's monitor was actually bright or just bright in contrast to the dim surroundings - either way, something I should have paid more attention to.

Whilst I could easily blame my poor performance on this project on a number of factors, i'd rather just accept that I made some obvious mistakes that day and use it to keep in mind on shooting day of our final sequence, where my group can certainly work together to use our strengths and judgements to ensure a much smoother filming process with more organised footage.

Editing the sequence

When it comes to editing, I tend to find the process a lot calmer than filming (despite filming certainly being more fun) as I typically have a lot more time to spend on editing footage than I have to shooting it, which allows me to spend more on carefully fixing any mistakes through experimentation.

Once my group partner and I sat down to edit our sequence however, I found that working on a project as tedious as this one within a short time limit was very difficult for me as i'm a very inconveniently detail-oriented person who likes to work in short sections in deep detail rather than finishing something roughly and then improving it in steps.

What resulted from this was us actually running out of time for this editing session as I admittedly took up far too much of our time in thinking of ways to produce a decent edit from this less than ideal footage, rather than focusing on simply getting the sequence together and finished, even if it didn't end up entirely good - which didn't even go for the section of the sequence we edited either way as we ended up with just a very roughly edited first section, followed by an empty project.

Firstly, whilst reviewing our footage, my failure to correctly use the 180 degree rule as well as my lousy exposure settings became very apparent, and proved that I wasn't entirely thinking through every shot as it seemed so obvious to me in that moment, so next time I will be sure to quickly look back on at least one take to check that it looks good before filming the rest of the sequence without knowing it would all look so poor.

Another clear issue that came up was abundant inconsistencies in audio, which was again due to the lack of timing of the silent pauses in between moments where neither girl was talking, this resulted in various shots with overlapping dialogue or background sounds that produced extremely rough audio cuts as we resorted to making a makeshift buzz track from the (very short) silences in between action, which we used to fill in any audio removed from dialogue bleeding in.

We were taught how to use the Crossfade tool in this software however, which you would drag onto cuts between two audio files in order to produce a smoother transition between them and prevent jarring sounds, but yet again we regrettably weren't able to add these as we very quickly ran out of time, even though it annoyingly would have only taken us a few seconds to implement.

Despite all of these complications, i'm surprisingly not too concerned about the editing process as I understand that the circumstances for this project were not ideal from a mix of lousily organised footage and too short of a time limit to attempt to fix accordingly (even though those are technically just excuses for my poor choices at the end of the day).

On the bright side however, i'm certain (and very relieved) that I will have a lot more time to spend on editing our final opening sequence, as well as being presented with much more coherent and better thought through footage to work with, so i'm confident that I will be able to produce a satisfying result along with help from my talented group mates to ensure that we are all happy with the finished product.

This is the link to what we ended up with;