While our outline for the trailer had not been fully envisioned until
the start of this term, we has the very basic concept of genre and tone and
were aware that we would require a wide range of footage. Thus we made sure we
exploited our summer effectively in order to aid the production of the trailer.
Both myself and my colleague, Philip, were to go on holiday during the
summer; myself to the far reaches of the world, in Australia, and Philip to
Paris and also the Isle of Wight.
While we were away we brought filming equipment. Being the owner of
our main camera, I captured my footage using the Panasonic HDC-S90, which
featured an anti-shake feature and would maintain our established look. However
due to my family's incompetence with capturing effective shots, I also brought
along a mini gorilla tripod - an ingenious contraption whose legs are flexible,
so can wrap around most stationary objects. This was highly useful in capturing
shots of myself without the awkwardness of family members filming me. For the
landscape shots I simply filmed it handheld, employing the anti-shake feature.
Philip, however, was left only with two options; his cameraphone, the
Galaxy Note, which could capture very high quality high definiton but at the expense
of stability, a fault exascerbated by his shaky hands (and which he brought
with him to Paris), and his sister's iPod Touch 5G which could produce
excellent images with perfect stability to boot.
With only a basic idea of what was going to
happen in our trailer we weren't ready to record any significant scenes or any
dialogue, but instead capture many establishing shots and action shots, with
our locations being optimum spots due to the famous landmarks and breathtaking
landscapes. In Paris Philip had the advantage of filming such famous places as
the Arc de Triomphe and the Pere Lechaise cemetery, while I had some stunning
cliffs in Australia and a few shots in an airport, and the Isle of Wight had a
castle and an exciting multi-coloured sand beach. There were a few short shots
filmed of various members of our cast running or jumping - shots which could
easily be intercut as parts of action sequences to speed up the ending to our
trailer. One of the problems with the footage is that only select members of the cast were able to be in each shot, so there are no full group shots in Australia or Paris, but this is only a minor issue, and it still looks very high budget. While much of this footage will probably end up on the cutting room
floor due to the somewhat irrelevance to our film's narrative, (and the
shakiness in the case of the Paris shots) what will be used, however, will
immensely add to the production value of the trailer due to the exciting
international locations which demonstrate the lengths to which we have gone to
produce it.