Filming Update...

We have now filmed all of the footage needed for our programme. It altogether went very well with only a few minor problems along the way, which we easily overcame. 

It took five main shoots to film everything for our sketch show: 

- The interviews in central London.

- Shannen's house to film paranormal activity and some of the challenges. 

- A multi-storey car park in Kingston to film some footage for the 'Annoying Chav'.

- Shannen's house again to film the rest of the challenges and another section for the 'Annoying Chav'      feature. 

- The green screen room at university for the introductions for each of the features.

• The main problem that we had when we were filming the interviews in central London was that the boom mic wasn't functioning properly. We made a bad mistake in not actually testing any of the equipment before we went to shoot at this location. When we got to our first location of the shoot (at Covent Garden) we realised the wire that connects the mic to the camera which we had been given from the loans room was faulty. There was not much that we could do about this, we had lots of footage to shoot, a tight time limit because of the daylight hours, and also didn't know of any technical shops in the area which could sell us a new cable for the boom mic. Because of our tight schedule, and the fact that we had all taken time to travel into London and meet as a group, we made the decision to try and film the interviews anyway. We thought we should see how they sounded when we got back to the edit suite, and if we decided that the quality wasn't good enough we could go back into London again and film the footage with the fully functioning boom mic. Unfortunately the weather was fairly windy on that specific day so the sound quality of the footage we took wasn't great. However, when we uploaded the footage onto Final Cut we played around with it for a while and managed to add some effects and filters and the clips all now have a good, clear sound to them which we are very pleased about. 

• The change in lighting was also an big issue that we faced when filming. Because we filmed the footage in the autumn, the times at which the lighting and brightness changed was different from shoot to shoot. In each of the shoots we were on a very tough schedule to get everything shot before the brightness changed and the light disappeared. We were very aware of this issue when filming, we made sure that there was no big difference in brightness from shot to shot, we knew we could get away with a little bit of difference by changing the filters and settings in post production on Final Cut. 

• Getting people to answer questions for the interviews was also an issue which we came across when filming. Approaching people and asking them to answer a few questions was much harder than we first anticipated, when some people saw that we had a camera they seemed to get scared of us and avoided us. At first it was quite daunting going up to complete strangers with a camera and a tripod and talking to them but as the day went on we all got more confident and we were getting better answers and responses to the questions because of it. 

• The green screen studio shoot was really successful. We all had experience of using it from different projects that we did last year so we made sure everything was planned and thought about before we went into the studio. This meant filming these scenes were very straight forward and took a lot less time than it could have done. Because everyone in the group had experience of using green screen before the editing of this was also made very easy and once we got the footage onto Final Cut it was very straight forward and the technique's needed for this quickly came back to us.