Narratives: The One Shot Film Project - An Insight Into What We Did

One Shot Film: The Meeting
With the Narratives module, our second project for it was all about the "One Shot" method of filming. One Shot filming is where the video is shot with one camera consecutively running throughout without it stopping. The camera can move during it, but for the project we had to work on, we were only allowed to move the camera once.

We had to create our own One Shot film in groups that was based around a fixed title, which was; “The Meeting”. As the title suggests, the film had to be some type of meeting and due to only being allowed one camera movement, we had to rely on other methods to help create the right feel for the film. This included the use of lighting, the content of the script, the position of the camera and how we used the single movement we were given and so on.

In my group, we decided to go for a humorous approach with this film rather than a dramatic one, as we felt we would be able to produce a comical video more easily. The original idea we had was to film a dinner date at an Italian restaurant, where we had a girl waiting there for her date to arrive. We planned on having the waiter gaining an “interest” in the girl and then flirting with her before the date arrives, upon when he does, the waiter suddenly shows a ruder, more “snobbish” side to his personality. We also filmed a test video of the dinner date to see how it turned out, but we felt it wasn’t enough as it was so we worked on a more “fleshed out” and complex idea.

From that idea, we kept the original idea from it being a date, but instead of being just a normal date, we changed the scene to become the setting of a girl trying out speed dating instead. The idea this time would be that the girl would be sat a table, and a range of weird and disturbing characters would visit her during the speed dating service. We found a suitable location to shoot the film in, but we did have some problems with setting up the lighting and positioning the microphone. We managed to sort it out in the end though; the biggest problem that remained was the tables we used. The tables were pretty high up along with the chairs, and basically the camera had to be positioned behind the person who was sitting opposite the girl but it had to be above them as much as possible so you only saw their hands. This was quite a pressing problem as we had to replace the chairs with smaller ones and also had to “duck” to avoid our heads appearing in front of the camera.

The reason we chose to film the person’s hands though was because we had more characters in the film than we had people to play them, so we tried to give create the impression that there is a different person sitting there each time. We were also quite limited on time and budget, so we couldn’t afford to spend money on buying costumes, which would probably only be used for this film only, hence we improvised here. We had a lot of characters altogether in the background and foreground, thus we had to create some sort of schedule so that we could have our characters enter and leave with ease as well as giving us time to get into position and such.

When it came to filming the final video, we did end up having to retry it several times as expected due to unexpected problems, including a girl who walked in playing her drum during one of our final takes, hence ruining it. The video we have right now is where I said to the group we should stop filming now and take what we have now as the final version, which was really lucky because literally five minutes later, the African society turned up next door and started singing, dancing and playing drums which would thus created some sort of a rainforest or jungle style setting due to the “backing music” coming from that society. We still made minor mistakes in the final shoot particularly me, but we are all happy with what’s been produced and it has turned out better than we expected especially in certain places.

When I looked over the video, I noticed things that I could change or improve to be honest, and I guess that what helps to form a great designer/inventor/creator or the like. If I had another chance to produce a film like this with more time to develop it, I would be happy to as I wish I had more time to rehearse my parts and also plan more ideas for it. The final video did turn out to be very long in length by the way, we were thinking of cutting out sketches from it, but we may just keep it as it is.