15. You don't half pick your moments to talk about, the things you never wanna talk about...

Time to feel everyone in it seems.

Guess what ... we filmed everything on Friday morning and it went really well :D.

We filmed in the Woolpit museum instead of the village hall I think because it was cheaper to book and easy to organize.

Here is what it looked like when we got there:


Then after we built our set from basically scratch (we only had tables and chairs to work with) we managed to create a sorta greasy spoon looking set:


Although dad said that there should have been tomato sauce bottles on the tables rather then just salt and pepper shakers. However, for the first set we've ever created out of nothing we were pretty pleased. To light the place we made filters by shining light onto tin foil sheets, as shown in the pictures here:


So with the set ready we had to prime the actors. Appearing in the kitchen would be our two Jack chefs Mr Stanton and Mr Brown, appearing as two cafe customers would be the keen animator Mr Cooper and our good friend Mr Miller (returning for a part longer then half a second this time), I was a somewhat camp waiter and Mr Sibley filmed the whole thing with the help of my camera (dad wouldn't let me borrow his in the end) and my tripod. Our star man being the legendary Zal Jones, a somewhat student film veteran now. The crew:



Filming went well we had about two or three dress (not filming) rehearsals to make sure everyone knew what was going on. We then had a filming re rehearsal, James went around holding the camera and everyone started to act. We then took two takes with actual acting and real food for Zal to eat (cooked by me and Mr Stanton and prepared by Mr Brown), they both went really well and I managed to edit the footage from take 1 into a small promo here:

Watching back the footage highlighted a few problems:

• In both takes (you can see in the promo) as Zal walks out the cafe you can see our lighting stands, however in the second take Zal has finished singing the song by this point so by some careful editing we should be able to edit out any notice of this to the audience.
• My fear that the table was too over exposed may be in affect, in youtube form it does defiantly look more exposed however it looks good on the computer screen.
• The sped up part will be very difficult to edit using iMovie. I used Adobe Premier Pro CS3 to edit the promo which has this handy tool that can stretch video clips to fit in any gap, so I jus edited the speaking parts, left a gap and then plonked the sped up sandwich eating bit in there and stretched it to fit. Whether final cut has this tool is a different question though.

However negative this may seem, I was very pleased when I finished editing, as we played the Strokes at half speed in the background of filming and made Zal mime to that, then speeding it up was very easy as I only had to had to set the clip 200% (speeding it up by 2x). I had quite the jig after first look and after the final thing was edited down I was very happy with it. It is obviously a very rough edit, for example the stills at the end could change to match the drum beat, but never the less I was throughly pleased with it.

Hope you enjoy ... more still I hope when we edit take two into the real piece of coursework it will look truly awesome ... things are looking likely to that fact.

Now filming is finished, I'm planning to start the evaluation soon, all the way up to editing, as all the planning has been done now. Annotations of the lyrics will also be posted shortly.

Yay ... hope everyone else's production is going great ... see you all soon.

Laters