Conversation Evaluation - Filming

Before the filming, we had already picked out a room to film in, although we weren't sure whether we would be allowed to work there. Luckily, we were let in and the room was exactly what we had hoped - all the windows were covered by blinds, perfect to experiment for the film noir style we had been researching. We reorganised the furniture to fit our method of filming and to put the room into a more appropriate arrangemement for the mise-en-scene of film noir.

Our camera angles and movements were already mapped out by the storyboards, so all we had to do was recreate them. The first problem was the unavoidable noise inside the Sixth Form common room, outside out own room, where we needed to do the first part of our filming. In the end, we just got on with the filming, making three or four takes. We planned to use the one with the least background noise, although we hoped that since this shot had no dialogue it would be easy to drown out the diagetic sound with the soundtrack in the editing. The room was luckily silent, which meant that we didn't have to worry about this for the rest of the video. Even so, we recorded some sounds and dialogue multiple times in order to pick the best ones afterwards. One shot wasn't used because someone's legs were visible in a window.

We had no trouble replicating all the angles we had planned in the storyboard, as they were interesting but not massively ambitious. At one point, to gain even more height on the angle, we placed our tripod on a set of three chairs. This was about as ambitious as it got, and it was largely to make up for the fact that Mike is very tall and the tripod cannot normally see over his shoulder. We made sure at the end to return the room back to its original state and to put the camera and tripod away properly.