What i have learnt from the production of my swede.

In class when making a film I realised how difficult it can be to plan everything correctly.

The first thing we had to think of was planning the film and deciding who we wanted to play parts in our film and where we would film each part making sure we got a range of mise-en-scene. We had to make a sweded film so chose to re-make the first Harry Potter. We thought of different scenes we could remake and then we had to decide what actors we needed. The characters we needed to cast were: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Uncle Vernon, and Professor Lupin. We also needed someone to play the voice of the sorting hat. As we only had a group of 4 people we decided we needed to double up on characters to play. Then we only needed someone to play the part of Harry as he was in almost every scene so we could not get him to double up with someone. This became difficult as we had to decide who we wanted to ask to play the part of the lead character. We also had to find someone that wasn’t in our class that had a free period so that we could film in the time we were given. This showed me how difficult it can be for movie directors as they have to decide on all the actors and actresses they want to play all the characters and normally they would have many more characters than we had in our film.  

We also had to decide what props and costumes we needed in our film. As it was a non-budgeted film we did not want to buy things to film so we thought of how we could find these items. We made envelopes out of scrap paper and then used a sheet of plain A4 paper to make a Platform 9 ¾ sign, so that we could use this to create a new setting. We also made glasses for Harry Potter to wear out of paper. We had to find books for Hermione to hold so we just used our own school books for iconography, lastly for Harry Potter’s luggage trolley we managed to speak to the school science department to see if they had one we could borrow. We then found black material for cloaks, an old hat for a sorting hat and we found twigs outside that we could use as wands.

We could then move onto preparing to film but we had to consider a risk assessment, deciding what the risks were and how we could avoid them. We highlighted a key risk as dropping the camera so we decided we would leave it on the tripod when filming and if we had to carry it somewhere we would make sure to hook the strap on to our hands. Another risk was tripping over when filming so we decided we would walk between locations and only run if it was needed for the film.

The biggest problem we faced when filming was when we tried to set up our tripod as it did not have a spring meaning we could not adjust the height of it. This would have caused great difficulty as we wanted to get a range of shot levels in our swede. However we managed to swap our tripod before we started filming.

We had a time limit of an hour to film everything we needed for our piece; we exceeded this time limit, which is therefore something we need to work on improving in the future. If we had been filming a professional film the timing would have been important due to release and premiere dates.