Practice Filming and Editing

Today we had our first go at filming and using final cut express. For the first half of the lesson we did our filming. We decided to make the video about our school: Overton Grange. The video was a short tour around some of the location.

The video includes various different shots such as:

• Pan shot - to show the audience the location that we were in. 
• Long shot - to emphasise how big the location is.
• Low-angle shot - to make the subjects look powerful and big.
• Hand-held shot - to give the audience a sense of realism. It makes it feel like they were actually there, taking a real tour of the school.
• Close-up shot - it shows the subjects emotions. In the context of the video it is to show the audience how happy the subject is to be a student at Overton Grange, therefore making them want to send their child here or make a child want to come here.
• Zoom shot - it was used to put the focus on a certain object. 
• Tilt shot - to show the location to the audience.
• Tracking shot - used to focus the audience on the object of the subject in the shot.

We wanted to use a range of shots in order to get to grips with working with the camera. It also gave us a chance to see the shots that we liked and gave us ideas of the ones that we could use in our film opening. I personally liked the hand-held shots and the Low-angle shots. 

Once we had finished filming, we returned to class and began using Final Cut Express to put our pieces together. We put all the different videos that we shot together to make one video. We also made some corrections to the video. For example, in the low-angle shot of Ollie and Sam the sound was not appropriate for the video so we removed it. At the end of the video text is featured showing the names of the group and of the people that featured in our short film.

Although we only used some basic editing and filming techniques, doing this activity has allowed us to gain experience in using the camera and using the editing software. Therefore when it comes to filming and editing our final piece, we will have some experience and will be able to use skills we have already gained and also improve them. Giving us a better result when we complete our film opening.