Tuesday 27th November

We watched our footage from our test shoot today, after doing a quick test edit we were quite happy with the results but have still decided on a lot of changes:

• Lara needs to look completely hysterical because during our test shoot it wasn't believable that she had been/is about to be raped, so we decided to make sure that; she runs faster, is a lot more clumsy and stumbley (making it obvious she has been drugged), she has to look a lot more scared, and we are also going to mess up her hair, smudge her nmake-up, and put mud on her legs/arms and dress.
• Nick also needs to be further away from her otherwise it is so unbelievable that he hasn't caught her already, and he also needs to take bigger more confident strides.
• Our framing also needs to be tighter in order to really focus the audience's attention on Lara's emotion.
• We also need to start recording before we say action, and leave it runnign for a little afterwards and have our actors run in and out of the frame to give ourselves more choice when editing
• During the shoot we didn't concentrate on shot logging and using the whiteboard, so this weekend when shooting one person will do the whiteboard, one will shot log, one will film, and the other will direct the actors. And obviously we will switch roles all the time to give everyone a fair chance.
• Our POVs also need more variance - e.g. looking up and down, and we are also not going to unfocus the camera on shoot but afterwards when editing so that we can fully control it.
• We also realised that we don't have enough shots, so we are going to take a lot more of her just running and stumbling to give ourselves more choice in the edit room - almost like filler shots, we also want more shots of her falling over.
• We realise a big problem of ours is continuity - i.e. the background matching up, so next time we are going to carefully choose a path through the forest. Then we will do POV shots all the way along the path, to again give us more choice when editing.
• Lara also got increidbly cold and unconfrotable - particularly between shots when she couldn't put her shoes back on, so this weekend we are going to bring an old towel (or some form of material) for her to stand on, and change on, and sit down if she wishes.
• Our main problem was our initial shotlist was also not very helpful so our main priority before this weekend is to create a perfect one which we can just follow and therefore avoid time wasting. We are going to talk through every single shot and therefore get any disagreements out of the way before hand.

Alix