Aspects of making a film

Aspects of making a film

We recently carried out the task of making a swede film and our chosen film was Forrest Gump. This task enabled us to learn the basic aspects that go into making a film.

Firstly when making a film you are likely going to come across several obstacles when looking to film the different scenes. These obstacles may seem very petty such as being careful when walking up a curb when carrying a camera, to avoid tripping and causing any damage to it. This is why it is important to carry out a risk assessment on the possible hazards before hand, to make sure that they do not cause any risk while filming. This was very evident during our filming because one of the members of our group was on crutches. This enhances the risk of tripping and causing others harm and also causing harm to himself on crutches. To overcome this danger we used a risk assessment which stated that he would not carry any equipment himself (to avoid damage), he would not open any doors himself (to avoid him hurting himself and also that he would leave an average of a metre between him and others when walking to ensure he didn't hurt anyone with his crutches.

Secondly when planning our different scenes it was important that we choose the correct actors that would best suit our swede. For example one member of our group looks similar to ‘Forrest Gump’ and another member looks similar to ‘Bubba’ so we decided to use them for these parts. This made it very easy to resemble different characters for our swede and deciding before hand and planning ahead ensured we knew exactly who was doing what when filming the swede. As well as this we learnt that it is important to find the correct settings for our scenes to make it feel as realistic as possible. For example we had a war scene in our film so we decided to film in an area with lots of trees and no buildings as this was similar to Forrest Gump itself. This was important because it reduced the look of a school as much as we possibly could.

Using and camera and tripod was an aspect that we picked up through trial and error. We used different methods to do this such as moving the height of the tripod to get different types of shots and also tilting the camera in different angles too. We also learnt that it is important to get the framing correct when using the camera to make each shot the best quality possible. These methods meant that by the end of the filming we had found the most suitable methods to capture different shots.

When deciding on the types and camera movements it was important that we used minimum movement of the camera itself. This was because using movements caused the footage to become unclear and of a lower quality. This is why we decided to use lots of steady and still shot from and variety of different angles to ensure the highest quality.

Time management was an issue that presented us quite a challenge on the day of filming. This was because it turned out that we hadn't managed our time correctly which meant that we didn't have enough time to film all of our scenes. Upon reflection we decided that we should have planned how much time we were going to spend filming each scene before hand so we knew a time scale to stick to. If we had done this it would have made our time management a lot better and we could have filmed all of our scenes during the correct time.

 Lastly because we are making our swede film on essentially no budget it was important that we were creative when it came to props. To make sure that our film still had an authentic feel to it we brought in props that we had at home to fit each scene. For example we had an army scene and one of the members of our group had some army outfits at home so we used these. It was methods like this that made our film work well even on such a low budget.