How the Shoot Day went:

Thriller - write up of shoot day
So my group and I had our thriller shoot and I can say that I thought it was a huge success. Here is my account of the day and what I thought went well and what could have been improved.

The day before the shoot my group and I chatted about all of our props and finalised every detail. When I woke on the morning of the shoot day, I felt eager to start as well as being excited and I had a slight feeling of nervousness. I knew that we had nearly all the props but still needed to finish the set and I realized that this may of effected our start time. I think our group was well prepared and quite organised for the shoot. We had to do a few things though before we could start shooting. For example, we had to hang the pictures on the wall, make the bed and finalize the room for the shoot. I think our set looked great and was pretty much exactly what we wanted. I think it worked well and I that we did get our American theme across. We also ended up not creating a bathroom as we realised we could use a simple technique of lighting and sound effects to create the same conception of the 'motel bathroom'. We wanted to all share responsibility and try and do as many different roles as possible, so we took turns in directing, assisting and capturing photos and videos of our shoot throughout the day. I personally think I directed really well as I listened to Luke's advice and often led my group through what shots we wanted to use.

It took a while to start as we had to get the lighting right, as we wanted to make sure the lights outside the window were realistic but once we sorted that we were able to start. We also noticed that it was quite a short length so we had to work around that and figured we could make it longer when we come to edit it. I think one of the most successful part of our shoot was the lighting. We managed to create a great atmosphere of our set and it particularly worked well when the police lights flooded the room and our characters body frame was outlined and it looked very cool.

I feel that we should have been more prepared for our actor. Up until the morning of the shoot my group and I thought we were having a different actor to the one we ended up having. Luckily he was my brother so before we came into school I managed to pick his clothing that we wanted him to wear.

Another problem we faced was that we slightly had different views towards how our character was feeling in relation to the action. So I feel that we all should have been more organised on that front so that we would have been able to direct our actor more clearly.

I really loved all aspects of the shoot but one in particular I enjoyed was shooting the wide shot at the beginning as I felt like all of our hard work was being put in place and it was a good feeling to see it finally come together and look professional. I think the close-ups of our actors face with the lights shining on his face is what I'm looking forward to and also the shot were we put our camera on a crane and had it directly looking at our actor, I think that will come out great.

I think we did end up working ok together, although I do feel that some members did not make as much effort in the day as others. I have learnt that it is good to take on responsibility's and to try and be as organised as possible in order for a shoot to be successful. Overall I really enjoyed filming throughout the day and thought it was a great experience.