I found making this feature challenging. However, I learnt a lot from doing so. I feel our concept was strong and one that would appeal to a lot of people. After all, restaurants can be expensive and cooking isn't always very easy especially if you want to tuck into luxury food. Despite this, Zoe and I felt we could prove that you can create exactly that, in the comfort of your own kitchen without much effort. We decided to give ourselves a budget of just £12. With this we wanted to create a three course meal that would feed four people. Now that works out at just £1 per course per person. Perfect!
Or so we thought...
We severely underestimated the time that would it would take to not only cook but prepare and film the food. On our first attempt we felt that one camera would be enough, but without a camera man it became extremely difficult to capture good, interesting shots whilst also being the ones doing the cooking. We spent the best part of four hours, trying to solve the problem and eventually we gave up. Disappointed and £12 lighter.
To top this all off, one of our microphones let us down meaning that not all of our audio was picked up and the parts that were picked up were not the best quality. We decided to do the whole thing again.
Attempt #2
THIS WENT SO WELL. It's amazing, what planning can achieve. Note to self* Always plan each feature in great detail before filming. We started the day nice and early, we also had our ingredients delivered meaning we didn't have to do the horrible uphill walk with five heavy shopping bags. So far, so good. We also changed location and I know this sounds silly but I really think it helped us have a much more positive attitude towards filming. It felt like a new start and unlike last time, I really thought we could do it. This time, we filmed using two tapes, we had back up headphones and microphones. The very definition of organisation. At last, everything was running smoothly. By the end of our third course, we were exhausted but we realised that benefits of re filming.
I learnt a lot from the experience, one actually being the point we were trying to prove. Our food was delicious (even if i do say so myself) and I've been asked by a few people if they can borrow our soup recipe!
It just goes to show that you can have nice food at home, you can stuff your faces for very little money and above all, do not give up. Just stop when things go wrong, take a break and come back to it. If you do this, things will improve. I have to say I think it was the most stressed I have felt so far, but strangely it was the feature I have most enjoyed filming.
Take a peek below at our work:
Monday, 31 October 2011
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Bugger!
The brown stuff really has hit the fan this week. What a total nightmare. Filming was a complete disaster from start to finish. Re - filming tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
So this is what drowning feels like....
I've survived my first week working as part of the Feature Team for WINOL. I feel amazing! Despite the fact, that on more than one occasion this week, I felt like I was drowning in my work load and seriously questioning the camera's safety when in my company.
My first feature is based all around fashion, with its main angle trying to capture what this year's Autumn trends are going to be and whether the general public (or Winchester locals) are interested. It was a challenging week with the con's definitely outweighing the pro's but as we've all been reminded, making the mistakes now will benefit us in the long run and even the very best make all kinds of errors.
Zoe and I worked together for this feature as Fashion is a mutual topic of interest and we were both excited to be going out there and film. I think we underestimated how much balls it would take to go up and actually ask people questions when it came down to it. The minor detail that technology was constantly failing on us and our giant camera attracting quite an audience didn't really help matters. Thursday was a very stressful day and despite the fact, we spent almost six hours on Winchester High Street, we did not come back with a single second of footage. A lesson everyone should learn is to ALWAYS check your equipment before you make the long trek to town. When we arrived and had set up the camera, we annoyingly found out that we only had one microphone when it was vital to our feature that we had two. So, we climbed back up the hill, back to uni and got the second microphone we needed. 2pm arrives, and we are finally back on the high street, but things weren't going our way. The audio was having a bad day too and nothing seemed to work. The audio levels on the camera were moving, the microphones were all set to exactly the same frequency but still nothing worked. Even the headphones were working fine, the reason why the audio failed remains a mystery. In the end, we packed up shop and went home feeling annoyed and irritated that we had nothing of any use and had mentally prepared ourselves to come back with tonnes of brilliant footage and could then spend the next couple of days editing. How wrong we were...
Monday morning comes and today was the day we made another attempt to go out onto the streets and film. Hooray - it was about a billion times more successful. I definitely wasn't prepared for the amount of rejections we would get when we asked people if they wanted to be filmed, but luckily there were a kind few, who didn't mind at all and actually really liked being in front of a camera lens. Girls were usually more than happy to participate once you mentioned 'fashion', whilst boys took a bit more convincing. We had another tough time with the microphones in places and eventually settled on using the gun mic. I was very pleased when six o'clock came and we had nearly a full tape worth of footage. At least that meant, we had plenty to play around with. We took a quick detour to KFC for dinner, and then it was straight back to uni for a long night of editing. I wasn't wrong, it was a long night and we got back home at about 1.30am. Shattered would be an understatement. However, i'm so glad we put the time in to do it, it seemed to pay off although there were a few technical glitches that I will definitely learn from next time. An example was the fact that the radio mic wires were in shot, so much so that they couldn't be edited out. Definitely an error not to do next time!
So through the up's and down's, we did it. Zoe was good fun to work with and I think although far from perfect, i'm proud of our first feature. Maybe one day in the future we will look back and laugh at our mistakes. Take a peek at this year's Autumn Trends....
My first feature is based all around fashion, with its main angle trying to capture what this year's Autumn trends are going to be and whether the general public (or Winchester locals) are interested. It was a challenging week with the con's definitely outweighing the pro's but as we've all been reminded, making the mistakes now will benefit us in the long run and even the very best make all kinds of errors.
Zoe and I worked together for this feature as Fashion is a mutual topic of interest and we were both excited to be going out there and film. I think we underestimated how much balls it would take to go up and actually ask people questions when it came down to it. The minor detail that technology was constantly failing on us and our giant camera attracting quite an audience didn't really help matters. Thursday was a very stressful day and despite the fact, we spent almost six hours on Winchester High Street, we did not come back with a single second of footage. A lesson everyone should learn is to ALWAYS check your equipment before you make the long trek to town. When we arrived and had set up the camera, we annoyingly found out that we only had one microphone when it was vital to our feature that we had two. So, we climbed back up the hill, back to uni and got the second microphone we needed. 2pm arrives, and we are finally back on the high street, but things weren't going our way. The audio was having a bad day too and nothing seemed to work. The audio levels on the camera were moving, the microphones were all set to exactly the same frequency but still nothing worked. Even the headphones were working fine, the reason why the audio failed remains a mystery. In the end, we packed up shop and went home feeling annoyed and irritated that we had nothing of any use and had mentally prepared ourselves to come back with tonnes of brilliant footage and could then spend the next couple of days editing. How wrong we were...
Monday morning comes and today was the day we made another attempt to go out onto the streets and film. Hooray - it was about a billion times more successful. I definitely wasn't prepared for the amount of rejections we would get when we asked people if they wanted to be filmed, but luckily there were a kind few, who didn't mind at all and actually really liked being in front of a camera lens. Girls were usually more than happy to participate once you mentioned 'fashion', whilst boys took a bit more convincing. We had another tough time with the microphones in places and eventually settled on using the gun mic. I was very pleased when six o'clock came and we had nearly a full tape worth of footage. At least that meant, we had plenty to play around with. We took a quick detour to KFC for dinner, and then it was straight back to uni for a long night of editing. I wasn't wrong, it was a long night and we got back home at about 1.30am. Shattered would be an understatement. However, i'm so glad we put the time in to do it, it seemed to pay off although there were a few technical glitches that I will definitely learn from next time. An example was the fact that the radio mic wires were in shot, so much so that they couldn't be edited out. Definitely an error not to do next time!
So through the up's and down's, we did it. Zoe was good fun to work with and I think although far from perfect, i'm proud of our first feature. Maybe one day in the future we will look back and laugh at our mistakes. Take a peek at this year's Autumn Trends....
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