Review of Test Footage

In our reccy shoot, we did a rough shoot of how we intended to set out our original idea of how our thriller sequence would look. In this test shoot we filmed each shot in chronological order of events. We did this to see what the sequence would look like if we decided to go with those events in the sequence, how the shots would work with each other and we could think about technical aspects of how we would do some of the things in the actual shoot.

We made substitutions for some of the props and characters. We used a girl instead of a middle aged man as the mystery person in the back of the scene. We didn't have enough of a variety of people to use for the funeral scene so we used only a few teenagers, as the members attending the funeral. We couldn't control the lighting elements we wanted to because we didn't go back and edit the footage and we filmed it in day light, so when we wanted as darker lighting when the camera was focused ion the mystery man, we could only use the natural day light. As we weren't actually in a graveyard, it was difficult to make it obvious where the setting was so we just gathered the crowd in a semi-circle to make it obvious that they were looking at something. We didn't have any dialogue which we were planning to include in the sequence, this made the footage a lot shorter than we expected and we didn't know the shot length; we hadn't prepared any dialogue.

We tested a Mid/Long shot zoomed out to long shot of the people standing in front of 'him' to establish the setting and show where the characters are in relation to each other and to show that he is behind but also a dominant character in the scene.  We tested a close up of the phone of the man and of him sending the text to the girl at the funeral.

I think our whole group found this very beneficial as it made us realize what we needed to work on and that was our overall plot line and setting. We realized that there was too much going on in the first sequence as it was too complicated and we needed to simplify the sequence to build suspense and effect.

I think for our first idea that we did a test shoot on, the zoom movements when showing character positioning worked well. I think we could take this to our developed idea of having the camera zoom from inside the coffin to an establishing shot at the end of the sequence when revealing that it is in a graveyard. I think the location didn't work so well, in terms of having the whole sequence set in a graveyard, there's nothing very unsettling in that as a location. I think that with our developed idea, as it is mostly set inside the coffin rather than above ground it works better to build suspense and make a successful thriller.
When watching the footage back, there was definitely a lack of tension built throughout the sequence which we worked on to come up with our new developed idea.

By doing this test shoot, it has definitely helped our group to conclude that the original idea didnt work so well and didn't build enough suspense. We thought about the logistics of how our original sequence would be filming. we thought that the acting of the people at the funeral would add too much drama and wouldn't be as realistic.