Problem Solving: Unit 32 (1st Shoot)

Whilst we prepared for our Promotional Video Production  shoot we encountered a few problems along the way. First of all we had to consider the location, to do this we went location scouting. The first location we looked at was the studio next to the Art Room, after looking at the studio for some time we noticed that you could hear a lot of noise from the art room and this would get picked up on the microphone and would ruin the sound so we decided not to use it. Secondly we considered the media suite as it is the old hall of the college and has some of the original latin words going around the top of the room and also has some other old decorative parts, we thought this would be suitable because the people we were interviewing used to attend the college.

Whilst we looked around and thought about how we would frame the shots we discovered that to get the old features in the shot we would need to film at a really low angle as they are so high up, this lead us to decide not to use the media suite. After the two failures of location scouting we decided to use the library as it's very quiet and we also got permission to film in there from the staff. Now we had decided we took all the equipment such as the lights and white screen etc over to the library and started to set it all up. Once we had everything set up we went to go and get the cameras and when we returned the white screen had unraveled and collapsed which was really annoying as we were running out of time before the interviewees turned up. To overcome this problem we had to find yet another new location as there was not enough time to fix the white screen. So we went looking, this time, for an outside location as it was a nice day and we thought we would take advantage of it. The outside location we decided on was outside the old hall in the courtyard, we also thought that we would frame them sat on one of the benches with the hall in the background.

We set up two cameras, one from the front of the interviewee and one at right side of them, this way we could get more footage and from different angles so that we could get some useful cutaways. The camera I was operating was the one to the right and there was a problem with lense flare on the camera so to overcome this in a quick way I simply held my hand over the top of the lense to stop it from picking up the sunlight as much. we also discovered another problem and this time it was with the sound. We were originally recording on a zoom mic that was plugged straight into the Cannon 5d but when we did a test run we listened back and the sound was really distorted. To overcome this problem we decided to record onto the zoom mic not plugged in and also use a different mic on the camera, that way we have more options to choose from if one was an inferior quality. The final product shows that our problem solving proved effective as the interview turned out to be really successful, the shots are well framed and composed and the sound quality is high.