Filming

This week we spent Tuesday and Wednesday filming both our credits and opening scene. For this we required the dolly so we could accomplish the tracking shot for credit titles listed as name tags. However, we had trouble trying to film the opening credit shot because the dolly couldn't fit through door. The first shot was going to be of the detention sign outside of the classroom door and eventually the dolly shot would track into the classroom with the door slowly opening.

But considering we had trouble trying to fit the dolly through smoothly. We decided to skip the opening and come up with some alternative later and film the opening scenes first. For this we required a variety of shots of Ollie playing the main character. At one point we required a high angle of Ollie waking up which took a lot of effort by standing on two chairs with Ollie in between. Another technical difficulty we had in doing this was that Ollie wasn't allowed to move because this would wreck the continuity for the next shot. The tripod came in handy for these shots as we required different angles and heights to achieve the desired effect.

For the mise-en-scene, we didn't require any complicated lighting, costumes or props. For the costumes we just wanted the actors to wear normal jeans or tops that would make them look like students at high school. We also took advantage of the blinds at the back of the classroom so we could shave out the sun and use the classroom lights. For the name tags, we printed them off from Microsoft Word and also wrote our own detention sign because it would be tedious to just print off a single word after finishing all the name tags.

During the filming of our opening credits. We decided to film with background noise as having to act silent to aid in concentration wouldn't work as it was difficult to maneuver the dolly without crashing once. In the end, our alternative was to do a simple long shot of the name tags being placed on a single table with different hands exchanging the tags. This would make the opening credits more dynamic by having different hands so that viewers could see a different skin colors to show that we weren't being bland by having one person do all the work.