Copland task

Evaluation

In this task we focused primarily on developing our skills using lighting, and audio and filming equipment. We recreated a scene from the film 'Copland', but were allowed to adapt it to fit a college setting. Each of us were assigned a specific role so everybody was involved and could develop whichever skills they most wanted to. As I am focused more on performance, I decided to take on an acting role and played one of the main characters. My responsibilities involved developing the character, learning my lines and finding a suitable costume. As I was playing a staff member, I wore typical business clothes such as black trousers and blazer, and we also borrowed a staff lanyard to increase the authenticity. We had rather limited time to film the entire scene because of the location. We chose to film in the Hive and we needed to complete filming before lunch, which was when it would start to fill up with a lot of people. We set up all the equipment and had to test the lavier microphones as we had never used them before. We made sure to conceal it so it wouldn't be seen on camera, but the audio turned out to be rather crackly when we listened back to it. Luckily, the boom mic picked up useable audio and I made sure to project my voice so it could be clearly heard over the hum of people's voices in the background. When watching back the footage, I discovered that my main issue was eye contact as I glance at the camera in practically every shot. I wasn't aware that I was doing this whilst filming, but I know now that it's something I need to be more conscious of. Also, when editing the scene, we realised that we should've filmed some more shots from different angles to give the scene some variety, instead of switching back and forth between the few shots we had. This is mainly due to the limited time frame we had, so for our next project we will need to ensure we have a sufficient amount of time to film a range of different shots.