Construction post 3: Reflections on our main shoot session

I think that our main shoot went quite smoothly. We had already revised our sequence of events and took out shots that did not work well in the test shoot and added new shots to improve the continuity of our opening sequence. This made it a lot easier to film during our main shoot. However, we had a technical issue with the equipment - a loud sound came out from the headphones whenever we recorded our shots despite the sound being recorded properly. Although we thought that it wasn't a big issue, this eventually led to us not noticing background noise from the train that was going by during a few of our shots.

This is a video that I took of the noise that the camera was making and our attempt as a group to resolve the issue:

After our main shoot, we identified that the conflict scene between the character Craig and the bullies had to be improved. This was due to a combination of bad acting and the master shot that we took. We decided that in our back-up shoot we would record plenty of master shots from different angles so that we had a range of options to choose from when we edited our sequence.

When we showed members of our target audience (TA), they reacted positively to the shots in the house, commenting about the composition of the shots and the nice use of the GoPro when shooting shots such as the cereal bowl and the vinyl record shot. I think that the target audience enjoyed those shots due to the immersiveness of it and the inspiration from British indie films was evident in the response from our TA; consumers of British indie films, TV and music. However, many of them pointed out similar points that my group and made at the scene where the character Craig confronts the bullies as they said that it seemed out of character, which could be due to poor acting or not enough takes of the scene.

I also think that Alex's appearance did not make him appear like a chav. Because Alex was not confident in acting, we gave a few lines in comparison to Georgina but it seemed out of place that he would stay silent and then randomly punch our protagonist. In light of this, I made changes to the costume list so that Alex would look more 'thuggish' and Olamide made changes to the script so that he had more lines to say.

On the other hand, the footage from Alex's house was good and we were happy with the range of shots that we took as well as the spontaneous ideas that we got during the shoot. We chose to only reshoot the shots from Bowyer's Water.