CAMERA ANGLES
One angle we used throughout our film was when we used a side on shot of Leah (our actress), singing. We used a side on shot to make it seem like she is not speaking to the audience, but is speaking to someone else, this could either be herself or to her boyfriend. We believed this made it seem more personal, hence making the whole relationship seem more special.
One of my favourite shots we used was when Leah was walking under the tunnel and then walks out with Ant. We thought this would show that she had walked into life alone and then ended up with him. You can also notice that Leah seems happier when she has walked out of the bridge, as she is walking quicker and is holding hands with Ant.
WHERE WE FILMED
From watching our video, you can see that we used very simple locations including; a park, a bedroom and a garden. The lyrics are very simple and we wanted to follow this as a boundary for the settings, hence why they are all very local and accessible.
One of my favourite shots, notable for its simplicity is a shot of the couple on the hill. The shot is from quite far away to show that they are very secluded and enjoy being just with each other. The sense of being high up, looking down on the world, is a powerful image to give to the audience.
Another location which i particularly liked was the park. I believe that this gave the storyline almost a childlike feel. Nowadays, adulthood is usually a very stressful time, this is why we set the opening shot in a park, to bring the two characters back to childhood and back to where they could be happy.
CHANGES
The main change we made was the shot where Ant is holding the wand. We originally wanted to do this on a green screen, however we then went on to find many problems with this. For one, the green screen we had access to was small, and we would not be able to fit their whole bodies in. Secondly, we were not sure how it would work as we had never used it before, therefore we realised there could be several technical difficulties. Thirdly and most importantly, as the rest of our shots had been so simple, we weren't sure how it would transition, from a simple shot to a green screen.
At one point, we also planned to show the couple having an argument, as Ant had just found photos of Leah with her exboyfriend, who she was still seeing. However, we changed this as we thought that the storyline did then not fit the lyrics, and secondly it would make the reader dislike Leah, which was not what we wanted to achieve.
EDITING
We edited our film on Final Cut Express. This programme is very simple and easy to use. At first, we had a wide variety of shots, all of which we could have used. It was hard narrowing them down to the best ones. In the end, we went for the shots which matched the music the best. Although, we knew from the beginning that we would start the video with the couple on the roundabout when we enter Leah's thoughts.
We did have problems when trying to edit our film , as we struggled to understand the programme well enough to operate it without any issues. We also had one problem when we lost some of our footage by making an error when saving our film and there was no way of undo-ing this so we had to go back and re-edit part of our film. However other than this, Final Cut Express is a very useful programme that helped us reach the high level of work that we achieved.
Ancillary Tasks (DVD Cover and magazine advert):
