Filming - Walking home

The Walking home scene was the first bit of filming that we did for our final project. This was because we were filming close to christmas and the town's lights were being switched on in a matter of days and as we needed the high street, so we had to get it out of the way. For this bit of filming it was Tom and I that went out to film with our other main character (Nikki). Tom drove us up two up to the pub where we started filming. After doing a couple of shots we realised we were goig to have a few problems. We were filming on a Thursday night so we thought it wouldn't be that busy outside the pub, it was. This was a major problem as our Walking Home scene is meant to be set around 1 AM so there wouldn't be many people or cars about. The other problem that we came across was the lighting. We had very limited ways of how we could change the lighting. We had could use torches and lamps but we figured that they wouldn't be powerful enough to make a difference, also we only had Tom from the group meaning that he would of had to do the lighting and camera work. In the end Tom changed a couple of settings around to turn the camera to Night Mode making a massive improvement on what we had before. The only problem with this was in some parts of the High street it was too light or too dark so we had to keep switching the settings back and forth. The next couple of shots were us walking through the high street (turning the corner and kebab shots). We didn't have too much trouble filming this but obviously there were people and cars again meaning we had to wait a while before we could actually do a couple of shots. We wanted to get the iconic kebab shot in as that pretty much sums up a night out on the town (the image we wanted to create). Unfortunatly none of us had any money on us so we couldn't film us buying/eating a kebab so we had another idea. I went in to the kebab shop and explained to them that we were filming for our media A level and we needed their assistance, I then asked if we could have one of them throwing me out of the kebab shop or shutting the door behind me to make it look as if I had been in there causing trouble. One of the employee's seemed to like the idea but unfortunately the boss wasn't going to allow it. This meant we had to get a shot of Nikki and I simply walking past the kebab shop. The next shot that we planned to film was an extreme long shot of me and Nikki gradually walking closer to the camera down a rediculously long lane. On the way we would be skipping, falling over, laughing, hugging and anything else stereotypically drunk people do. This bit of filming was a mjor problem. First of all we had a football team do their fitness training down this path so we had to wait for them to finish, we then had 2 couples walking down the path as we were filming, then cats walking past and generally anything else you can think of came down this path.This meant going back and forth a lot of the time, we then ended up giving up so we went from half way. We are nbow going to do this in a stop motion kind of style as mid way through our walk we heard someone else coming so we had to semi jog to stop them from interfearing with our shot. The last couple of shots we got on this night were in the park. We had me and Nikki holding hands on a swing, hugging on a bench and the classic spin around looking in to each others eyes shot. The main issues with all of these was the lighting. In a park, with only one other person there turned out to be quite a tricky task to sort out the lighting. In the end we just hoped that the camera's night mode would be enough. After looking back on the clips we saw that we could use the swing shots as they were quite clear, and we could use half of the spinning around shots (where the background was light) but unfortunately unless we can edit the bench shot, we may not be able to use it due to the poor lighting. The final shot  we did was the kissing shot. This won't actually be the shot we use as we need to edit it and slow it down for it to actually fit in to our video the way we want it to. From this experience we learnt that you really do need extra lighting to get all shots exactly the way you want, we also learnt that  we needed to time our filming better so, if we messed up, we could go and re-film and a later date. However i thought that apart from the lighting on some shots that most of the recording we have are very successful.