First day filming.

Today was out first day shooting for Dystopia. We travelled to Spires Bank in North Yorkshire and arrived at around 10:30am. Knowing we had to leave by 2pm, we had roughly three and half hours to filming as much as possible. We knew it was going to be an issue filming in a forest in autumn, when the leaves were going to be changing, and if we had to return, it would be obviously different. So we had to try and get as much filmed as possible, in as many different ways, and shots as we possibly could.

We took various pieces of equipment with us; a video camera, a Nikon SLR with video capabilities, a tripod, a dolly, and a piece of carpet to provide a smooth surface for the dolly to roll along; we later used it to block out the sun when shooting outdoors. We used the dolly inside the house to film smooth moving shots of the two characters following the same path through the living room in the house. These are very subtle, but very cinematographic shots in my opinion.

Having two cameras proved very useful today. It gave us the ability to double the amount of footage we were able to film, as long as we were careful to not accidently get the other camera in shot. We did however use the SLR to film a 'behind the scenes', to document the entire shooting process.

I believe today was a success. I feel we worked well as a team, and we were able to convey any ideas that we did not have prior to arriving, easily and accurately. For example, the idea the put the glasses over the camera, to show the character putting them on in first person, and key framing the image to go from blurred to sharp as the glasses covered the screen, was an idea I had whilst acting at the base of the tree, and looking for ways to make the scene more interesting.



This is an image from the behind the scenes that we filmed, of Sean passing the equipiment to me before climbing on difficult terrain.



This is another image from the behind the scenes that we filmed. It shows Mark holding the piece of carpet we used to block out the sun when it was getting too bright for the camera.

Image above is the first shot we filemd today. After being altered in Adobe Premier, adding a blue lomography style filter using the 4-colour gradient, and RGB Curves, as well as a slight vignette around the edge.