Re-Shoot: Reflections

The re-shoot proved very testing for our group. First of all, we had organised the shoot for Tuesday 9th Decemeber only for one of our actors, Rob, to pull out on Monday due to various commitments. We resolved to shoot the entire thing again with me as the victim instead of Rob. However, the other actor, Matt, was not present at school due to illness from Monday to Wednesday so we had no killer. One option was to recruit Ben Tucker as a new killer but we were so impressed with Matt's acting that this was no option. We managed to resolve a new shote date for Thursday 11th December after some miscommunications with the media department, but this went ahead fine with both actors turning up.

So far, this had raised problems about organisation and communication, with our group learning that we should be able to get hold of actors at all times by a telephone number, that we should leave more time between informing our actors and the date of shoot so it is not such short notice, and that we have to communicate every single problem with our media teacher so she knows what is going on and when people are booked to shoot.

On the actual shoot further problems were evident. A highly inconveniant winter virus commonly known as common flu or a british cold had swept though our school leaving a large chunk of our year group bed-ridden! However Jack, Shaun, Rob, Matt and I had battled our way into school for the shoot, but our illnesses proved quite unproductive. Time was obviously wasted clearing out the space for our shoot quite slowly, and we were overall less motivated to work properly as we just wanted to get it done and go home. Generally, this made us miss some crucial continuity mistakes and filmwork was not as good as in the previous shoot. I was so ill I was barely able to take one shot! After the shoot we took our equipment back to the media department to find it closed, and so we had to leave everything in the school basement until morning. This was because one of our media teachers (who was supposed to be present at school that night), Miss Blackborow, was also incredibly ill and had gone home. This had left us with one more problem on our shoot and that was that our studio lights were without filters.

Looking back at the footage after we realised the lighting was strange, the continuity was terrible, the camera was slightly shaky and the acting was not quite as dramatic due to the actors being ill at the time. We thought one or two of the shots could be inserted into our old footage but none of them really fitted except for one cutaway. Therefore we created a sequence using mostly our old footage and this seemed to work well. However, we had originally re-shot because we did not like the flickering lights on our old footage, and we were told inevitably that we would have to do a second re-shoot to get this perfect.

In our re-re-shoot hopefully we will all be better from our illnesses and able to work more productively by shooting with order and purpose such as in the second shoot, but taking more care in continuity, lighting, acting etc. This should not be a problem, and hopefully this will all come together to gain the perfect set of shots to replace our old footage!