REVIEW OF TEST SHOOT

Review of Test Shoot.

I believe that as a first attempt, our sequence was somewhat successful; there was a clear structure to the narrative, it was somewhat captivating in terms of tension, and we had a basic understanding of the angles we wanted to use. However, we encountered many issues.

The first issue was with continuity; something I was very much aware of and attempted to
keep an eye on during our test shoot. However, as an actor tied to a chair this was extremely difficult! There were a few moments during our shoot where I noticed that someone had picked something up, or moved it, and I managed to return it to its original position but when editing, I realised that quite a bit of footage had been lost due to the unnoticed errors in our clips. For example, when shooting the man's preparation of the poison, I noticed that certain props. such as the tweezers, were changing position, and the movements of the man's arms were not the same from every angle that we filmed. This resulted in our overall opening sequence being shorter than the required minimum of 2 minutes. One thing that I personally felt but my group didn't, because of this, was that the transition pace between each clip was far too quick, resulting in our sequence having the appearance of a music video rather than something that would be found in a film. However, this was not a major issue as we still did have a rough, basic outline of what our narrative was, including the tone.

Another issue that we faced was that we did not follow the proper protocols on set. This involved calling 'stand by', 'standing', 'roll camera', 'camera rolling', 'action', and 'cut'. However, I am glad that we made this mistake as it taught me the importance of it and how crucial it is to do this; when editing, around 3 minutes of footage had been spoiled due to audio issues of non-actors speaking, acting starting before the camera was rolling, continuity issues, and in general, potential shots lost. For example, when shooting the woman's foot struggling, the struggled, muffled groans could not be used as non-actors were speaking through the shot - to fix this, in editing I had no choice but to reuse the audio from a different shot (though we got away with it, I found it noticeable as I recognised the same audio file being used and cut in an awkward place due to the limitations of iMovie). 

The last major issue was with our planning. We had an outline of the narrative but there was little idea of what angles we wanted to use, so on the test shoot day we found that we were experimenting quite heavily. Though this did spark and generate some possible shots for our final product (such as the over the shoulder shot shown on the right), again, a lot of footage was lost as some angles simply didn't flow well alongside one another (hence why the edited product is quite fast paced), we didn't have enough activities to film in our narrative, and a lot of time was spent trying to find a good shot which reduced our overall time left which we could have spent filming. However, this prompted us to create a list of exactly what happens in our narrative to ensure that this doesn't happen again next time:

• Puts on the vinyl
• Man whistling along to the song, he walks from left to right, pan follows his waist as he walks past his scientific set up (distillation, equipment out)
• Over the shoulder shot from the woman to the man over by the window (silhouette)
• The whistling stops and he takes out a bag of berries in the same shot
• Close up of him holding up the berries to the light of the window
• Extreme closeup of clock ticking with the sound
• Extreme closeup of gentle roaring flame
• Extreme closeup of bubbling water in the flask (foreshadowing the bubbling funnel)
• Medium closeup of him putting the berries down 
• Close up of his chest and lower half of his face looking out of the window (from a diagonal angle)
• A shot of outside through the window (POV) of the sky?
• Close up of his chest and lower half of his face again but he returns to his task
• Shot of all of the equipment again
• Shot of foot struggling from behind as it is tied to the chair
• Tweezers sterilise with fire 
• Pick the berries out of the bag and into the pestle and mortar 
• text message (shot of phone buzzing on a different surface). His wife asking what he wants for dinner that night
• closeup when one falls on his hand
• Uses bleach or a strong chemical to wash his hands because of the berry 
• he picks it up again with tweezers and discards it 
• Puts on rubber gloves, for extra protection
• Wipes the tweezers off on a bit of tissue (something of that sort)
• Extreme close up of blade slicing the berry 
• Crushes the berries with loud banging (shown through different angles and titled, distorted angles to create sinister intention)
• Uses a spoon and puts it into a beaker
• Close up of pure water dripping from the condenser of the setup into a (different) beaker, he grabs it
• Pipette, a few drops into the crushed berries, swirls it around
• Puts it down, sighs, tapping his finger / he is anxious
• Sits down
• Takes off his gloves, (sitting) and smokes as a reflection 
• Another over the shoulder shot from the woman of him smoking at the window
• Puts it out, walks to the poison
• The prepared poison in front of him, pan follows him as he walks to the woman 
• Extreme close up of her eyes, distressed
• Silhouette of him coming towards her from her point of view
• Quick cut her hands struggling hard
• Quick cut feet pushing harder
• Quick cut the vinyl spinning
• Quick cut her eyes are wider, tears rolling down her cheeks (these quick cuts could be jumped between in editing to create a frantic desperation)
• He pours in the poison
• Over the shoulder shot looking down on her as she chokes
• Extreme closeup of funnel bubbling, liquid spilling over and splashing her face
• Extreme closeup of eyes getting weaker
• Extreme closeup hands going limp 

Though this is not our final outline, this will help provide a decent foundation for reference in future planning and production. Overall, I do believe that the opening sequence was successful as we shot the basic things that we wished to upon planning, crafted tension through the use of non-diegetic sound and certain angles and had a good first attempt at shooting.