Reflections on Teacher Feedback & on The Second Shoot

Today we managed to edit most of our sequence from the footage we shot last Saturday.
By doing this we were able to see which shots worked, and which didn't and we can therefore re-take the shots. At the end of the day, we were able to Show Miss B our sequence and she gave us useful feedback, suggesting ways of improving it and calming our nerves as we were very worried about a lot of our shots! Especially the outside shots of Barney.
Unfortunately, due to ill health, Barney was unable to come to the shoot tonight so we were unable to shoot what we had planned. Despite this, Miss was able to give us some advice on how to really improve our insdie shots of Laura.
Firstly, lighting. We all agreed that our shots look flat and we re-took these shots with lights from differnt angles in order to provide contrast. I think this was quite sucessful, and we managed to create intersting shadows with the bannisters in some of the shots and we'll see how effective these are when we capture on Monday. We also added candles to the Hallways shots and we think this really adds to the mise en scene.
Miss also had another really good suggestion - a steamy bathroom shot.
Initially we had the outside establishing shot, which then cut to the bathroom window, which then cut to an opening pan of the bedroom.
Miss said this would work, but then after watching the rest of the sequence we all decided that it would be a LOT more effective if we made Laura seem perfectly normal without revealing that she's slightly odd (by showing the candles and photoframe) until later on in the sequence.
To make this possible, she suggested including Steamy Bathroom shots! We managed to do these tonight, and we are all quite happy with the footage. We filmed through the shower screen her showering, with all the steam etc, and then her stepping out the shower. For continuity purposes, we had to make sure the back wall wasn't seen because the next shot is her leaving the bathroom and it's a differnt bathroom, where the walls are white - NOT bright blue.
Other shots we re-took are the last two shots, because we felt they were too dark.
We are lot happier with the footage now, and we plan to shoot the outisde shots with Barney next Saturday (13th) so we have all this week to edit the insdie sequence with Laura.

-posted by Alice on behalf of the group