The Filmmaking Journey of Tom Swales

Recreating a scene from a movie Our first task was to find a scene from film that we like and re-shoot it, shot for shot. We all went home over the weekend and tried to find a scene that we could re-create. Sam showed us a steady shot from the shinning of the child on the tricycle. We then did the storyboard of the shining scene so we could get the scene perfectly. We had to find an alternative for the tricycle, so James brought in the skateboard and we used that. To get the steady shot we first decided to put the tripod on the movable wheels to get the shot really smooth. The tripod was a bit too wide to go around the corridors, furthermore the shot was a bit too high compared to the original Shinning scene. The struggle that we had was it is all one shot so we had to get it perfect without any cuts. We then decided to use a fig rig to get a lower, smooth shot. To make the steady shot even smoother we put my on a movable chair and Kai pushed me to get a smooth steady shot. Whi...

The first week of the course has been fun and interesting, we have learned new skills including basic editing, controlling the camera and making our own short film. During this week we have worked in groups and we have made friends and we have all worked really well as a team. On the first day we learnt about our first major project of the year. The project is a Christmas advert, we then researched different Christmas adverts that we remembered. We studied the adverts and created a power point about the chosen Christmas advert. Me, Joe and Kai worked on the 2015 John Lewis advert 'The man on the moon'. We focused on the message of the advert and how it connected with us as the viewer. We also wrote about the different techniques they used to make the audience feel sympathy for the characters in the advert. On the second day we learned the basics of using a camera, including putting a battery, headphones and microphones in the camera. We then split into two groups and film...