DP1 Film - First couple of weeks

I am currently doing the Film project in DP1, it was the area I felt I had least association with, I'd never really done anything do with film, and never really had an interest in it, but I was willing to give a try and see how I got on.

The brief was to produce a 'one-shot film', which is pretty self explanatory, it basically means you have one camera, and it must be in the same position for the entire film. Although we are allowed one pan or zoom in our pieces. The only other rule we have is that there cannot be any credits or similar added at the end, if we want they have to part of the film. 

In the first week we were put into groups and asked to produce a practise one-shot film, after much deliberation I came up with an idea that we could do. Basically the you see someone walking in the distance towards camera, then people start running past the camera, away from something, however the viewer does not know what, the person that is walking towards camera is completely unaware of what is going on around and continues to walk on, he eventually becomes aware of what everyone is running from, stops dead in his tracks, turns and runs! It is a simple idea, but I thought it could be quite effective because there is an element of suspense because you don't know what is going to happen, and also there is mystery as you have no idea what everyone is running from, we were lucky enough to be able to produce what we needed in one shot, this is what we produced: 



One-shot film from Harry Cook on Vimeo.

I am happy with the out come believe we achieved what we set out to, I would like to added some suitable ambient noises, such as police sirens, to add to the overall feel. 

In the second week, we learnt about lighting and how effective it can be, I found this really interesting, and I never really realised how simple and yet effective light can be. Light can be really manipulative and it can really change the mood of the scene or the feel of the setting. We were given the task of going off to the studio rooms in our groups and attempting to re-create a particular lighting, our group was given the task of re-creating daylight, to do this we had to use blue filter gels, which make the light a lot colder, it was actually really difficult to create but with a bit of help we get there in the end. The secret is to set up each light individually to know exactly where it falls and how effective it is, whereas as first we were trying to do it with all the lights on at the same time. Once set up correctly the effect on camera was really impressive.