Storyboard/Preproduction
Storyboard/Preproduction
I decided to go with a Western Standoff idea at first. I thought that with the shots we received, a Nerf gun standoff would be funny. The first shot that came to mind was the fingers hovering over the holstered gun and the bullet popping off the forehead. I developed the story around this.
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I didn't use my time well, and ended up not having enough time/resources to film this story. In the future, even if it seems like more fun to sit with my friends, I will find my own space where I can focus and get my work done in a timely manner.
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I had to film a new story, so I looked at the shots, and thought about what I could film using just myself, the shots, my house, and my pets. I ended up coming up with the idea for an intruder, who ends up being my dog.
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Filming
In the filming, I quickly ran into a few problems. One was that I couldn't film myself doing the scenes where I needed two hands in the shot. I came up with a solution by balancing a laundry basket on a chair, and using a book on top to prop up my phone. I pressed record, set it in position and then did the scene. Another problem I ran into was figuring out which rooms to do the different scenes in. My house is not actually laid out the way I attempted to portray. I used cuts on action, and other jump cuts to avoid continuity errors. I had to also adjust some of the shots that didn't perfectly fit my story. For instance, I couldn't think of a way to use a letter to add to the story, so I used the "letter on a desk" shot as a way to add more to the scene of me picking up a gun off my desk. I also made the gasp into more of a sigh of relief that there's not an intruder. A big problem I ran into was that my dog was at the dog park. My cat was available but he didn't want to stay where I put him, so I had to reshoot about 10 times to get the shots I wanted. It was actually a lot of fun and a good challenge to try to overcome these problems with no one's help. I feel I learned a lot doing this, and that I will be more adept at overcoming problems on real shoots in the future.
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Editing/Postproduction
In the post-production stage, I didn't get very much done, but I was able to clean up the raw footage, and put it in the right order. I will add a soundtrack, sound effects, and transitions when needed, but right now it's just the sounds from the raw footage. This is not the final video. The editing that I did so far wasn't terribly difficult, most of the problems I encountered were in trying to get the footage from my phone to my computer and into iMovie. However, I did run into a big problem when my iMovie wouldn't open without immediately crashing. Luckily, my brother was home and I was able to use his computer.
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