Pre-lim Fliming

Here is a screen shot of some of our pre-lim filming. After our first lot of pre-lim footage, we decided to focus more on the particular shots that we want to use. For example, we practiced the close up shot of the girl in the cafe when she is reading a book. We still feel as though we haven't perfected these shots yet but are still more confident with using the camera. 

We tried a high angle shot of the girl reading in the cafe, which we think works quite well. She looks directly at the camera as if she's looking at the boy who's just walked into the cafe, thus creating a POV shot. When watching this shot back, we realised just how important mise-en-scene is, because even though this was just a practice shot, the mise-en-scene still dulls the overall impact of the shot. From this we've learnt to take great care in choosing our mise-en-scene so that our film has the best possible impact, provoking thought and emotions in our audience.

Here's a short video of some of our shots edited together. It's the same shot practiced four times because we wanted to try and perfect it. In the third shot, the sunlight coming through the window behind definitely doesn't work, as it creates glare and also darkens the girl so that she can't be seen very well. This has taught us to experiment further with different lighting and face away from natural light coming from a window for example to allow the characters to be seen clearly.

We didn't exactly get the effect that we wanted to achieve with this shot and definitely need more practice. We wanted to have the book in crystal clear focus with the background slightly blurry, so we can just see the figure of the boy walking through the cafe but not in much detail, remaining quite mysterious. We felt that it was a good first attempt, but we need to experiment more with depth of field and keeping the camera steady.