Filming and Editing*

I really enjoyed filming and editing my thriller sequence, even though there were a few bad moments and I did come across a few problems.
The camera I was given to use while making my film was broken, as the flip out screen used to view, did not work. However this did not affect my production as I just used the normal view finder instead, which in the end I think helped me, as the battery lasted longer than most other peoples in my class, and also made the framing of shots more accurate.
My brother filmed the scenes the majority of the time, only being 14 I thought he did quite a good job of framing the shots and holding the camera steady.
The day we decided to filmed on was one of the coldest days in January, which was quite unfortunate as all the film involved being outdoors, with me wearing nothing but a scraggy old top and leggings (so I didn’t wreck good clothes when jumping in the lake). The weather that day also made me greatly regret deciding that the climax of my thriller should involve me jumping into a lake that had lumps of ice floating around in it.
The ‘dump of the body in the lake’ scene posed a few difficulties, first being that the visibility under the water was almost none existent. Every time the lakebed was disturbed by the underwater cameraman (Adam Dugmore) moving, dust would be kicked up from the bottom and reduce the visibility, this was easily solved by him moving as little as possible.
Another problem arose as I had forgotten that Adam couldn’t be filming me being thrown in the lake and also be throwing me in the lake at the same time. Therefore I decided that the scene would have to be shot from slightly underwater to obscure the view of my brother dropping me in.

I can honestly say that jumping in that lake was one of the worst experiences of my life. It was actually that cold. It was so cold that as soon as I hit the water I couldn't breathe, or move my arms or legs properly, and had to get my brother to drag me up onto the deck.

Other than those few problems I thought that the filming of my thriller went extremely well.

I had pretty much no problems whilst editing my film either. However there was one point whilst editing where the film repeatedly kept freezing at the same point, but this was fixed by rendering the sequence. I knew that I wanted to have my thriller kept relatively simple, as I thought that the creepiness and tension built up would be lost if I used lots of transitions and special effects that were distracting.

Recording Log and Editing Decision List