Production

For the lip syncing activity to 'total eclipse of the heart', Leah and I felt that it would look good if we practised the movements we were going to be doing before we filmed it. Therefore, for the first part of the song where there are two voices, I was close up to the camera (which was on a stand at face level to Leah and I) and Leah popped up behind me on her appropriate lines. I felt that this looked humorous and also made the video more creative. We then jumped up and did silly dances during the interval, which also created humour. The final video did look funny but also looked a bit of a shambles, a storyboard or screen shot list may of helped us to organize our video better.

The storyboard and screen shot list helped organize the class to let them know what they were doing every day in the week. On the first lesson, we knew that we were filming all the shots that take place in the classroom. Therefore, we organized beforehand to have old-looking school desks placed in the room. Everyone knew that they needed to bring in school uniform and therefore it got us off to a really good, organized start. We began the production by asking the cast to do a run through of different scenes, the first shot we filmed was the wide shot of Josh (character 'Matt' in Busted) who confidently pushes his friends aside to sit at the front of the class and stare at the attractive teacher at the front of the room. Josh had to sing along to the song and this was probably nerve racking in front of the class so I said that they should practise it first. I then watched a few practise run throughs of the first shot as Sophie filmed and then we filmed around 3 takes so that we had a variety of shots to choose from. After we had filmed the shots, we watched them back and told the cast how to improve to look more like the video.

The shots with Bonnie, who played the attractive teacher whom the students were lusting after, were difficult. This was because it was not a seperate shot but rather flowed into seperate shots. Therefore, Bonnie practised her movements while Sophie and I found a good way to film her. We decided to have it on 'zoom out' to start with and then tilt the camera slightly to show all her body and then have it zoomed in a bit more. This looked really good in the end and resembled the original video. Throughout the video, there are also various repetitions of shots. We filmed all of these in one go, for example, shots of extreme close ups of Bonnie's face are shown throughout the video so we filmed her face for several minutes in the right style then cut it down whilst editing it after wards. This allowed us to cut time by not going in order of the video. I found that we got through the classroom shots really easily due to good organization and the performers being confident. This shows me that when I do my A2 task, I should pick confident people who do not mind to perform because this always looks better and makes it easier.

The hardest shots to complete were the ones which were outside. We had to be really organized and find extras who were on that free. As director, I asked my friends who were all on that free to bring school uniform to college and meet outside of the building. I also asked my friend to bring her portable CD player which was really useful because we were able to play the track loud outside. I decided that the easiest way to film the scene was to record each memeber of Busted singing along and acting to the track and then later edit it in the post production stage rather than trying to complete every single shot of 'Busted' perfectly. We asked the extras to dance in the background of the three main characters, Busted, but this was hard to do because a lot of people obviously felt self concious. However, once they did it, it looked really effective on the tape. The biggest problem I found was working the camera because I turned it off whilst recording some scenes! This limited the shots we had to use in the post production stage and meant we missed out on some really good footage.

In conclusion, I feel that my Busted task went really well due to good organization by the whole class. Because of the preparation stage; shot lists, storyboards, prop lists etc, it allowed the production stage to run really smoothly because we were able to complete things quickly and effectively.