Emergency services shoot day 1

I was exited about the prospect of having a day dedicated to making a finished film, and how everyone would help and contribute, ensuring more shots could be taken. The planing in place to effectively complete the shoot was mostly secondary research with some primary research. The primary research was questionnaires and vox pops into finding out what people go to the museum, I would that the target audience of the museum is 30-45 year olds taking children under the age of 10. This information was useful because I could tailor the video to appeal to children by showing exciting exhibits like the fireman pole and I could make it look informative and educational so the parents will take the children. The secondary research was the most useful because it included useful information key to the shoot day like meeting times and meeting place, also the route to and from the shoot location. The weather report was also very useful secondary research because i could plan for doing shots of the building from the outside which were weather dependent. My group was tasked to capture shots from the fireman bedroom, the model train set, the bin fire recreation, the motorbike and the hall of firefighting. I contributed allot of the ideas for shot angles and sizes along with some of the focus pull shots.

The shots that I got were;

  • one of the shots of the fireman in the firemans bedroom
  • some of the focus pulls on the model railway
  • focus pull of the fireman at the bin fire
  • a shot of tom on the motorbike

The lighting problem

The main problem we encountered was the low levels of light snd as we were shooting on cameras with APS-C sized sensors they weren’t very good for filming in low light without having to raise the ISO above 6400 which looks to noisy to use in a video for a client. We overcame this problem by using a 50mm prime lens which had a wider aperture of f1.8 which let in about 2 stops more light than the f3.5-5.6 18-55mm kit lens at 18mm. Another problem we encountered was the fact that some of the exhibits were fairly boring to look at on camera so we overcame this by finding more interesting angles and using the shallow depth of field to make for a more cinematic look.

My favourite shots were the focus pull shots of the model railway, I liked them because they were properly exposed without being too noisy and because it was a macro shot there was allot of bokeh due to the shallow depth of field and I pulled into focus properly and smoothly.