Photos of the shoot

Opening track / storyboards

We discussed as a group that it would be good to have a opening track. I suggested this idea as other cooking programmes have a opening title taking this in consideration me and milly started producing the opening sound track. We decided to put ourselves forward for this as we are the only people in the group with any sound experience. 

We both knew the track had to be upbeat as our target audience is students. We started to produce sound in garage band as this is the software we're both comfortable with and its appropriate for what we wanted to produce. We was thinking of using a countdown as the programme is called 10 minute student meals, I thought this was a great idea. I suggested that we needed a good back beat to the soundtrack as our target audience is aimed at 18 to 30 year old's. This was easy to produce we used the drum pre-sets which are already in garage band.

Lauren who is the director wanted the soundtrack to last 15 seconds, so we made sure we kept to this time range when producing. We needed a countdown so we searched through all of the pre sets, this took a while as there are so many. But finally we found one that worked nicely. Milly felt the countdown should be at the start however I expressed my opinions on having it at the end and she felt this was the better idea.

My next role was to produce story boards for the shooting script which Milly had already produced. This enabled the group to visualise what the final film would roughly look like. As we have a Facebook group which we've used to keep in contact throughout the weeks, we have been able to discuss ideas and upload what we had produced. This was helpful and convenient for all of us. 

Final filming

Yesterday we had to go into the studio and pack all of the equipment for the shooting today. This was a huge learning curve as I have never done this before. However I got to grips with it easily. Our team worked well, helping each other when others was struggling. We had help from the technicians throughout this process and the multi cameras are very expensive. After this was done we was ready for our shoot the next day. This became very real and exciting.

We agreed that we would meet at 8 the next morning to move all of the equipment to the cooking room. We all turned up on time and worked together to move all of it. The guys in our group took the heavier items and us girls took the rest. Luckily we had our lecturer and a technician to help us set the equipment up as I had forgot how to do some of it. We began re arranging the room to how we needed it. As I was a camera operator I began putting the camera up. This proved to be more time consuming than I first expected, however with help from members of my group I was soon back on track. I helped others with the other two cameras as I set mine up quicker than some of the others. We had a issue with one camera as the tilt was messed up. We had to sort this out using the gallery equipment luckily this worked as we would of struggled with only two camera. After we had set up the equipment, Rob had to sort the lights out. Sadly we couldn't have any purple gels for our E4 theme. This was a real shame as we have lost that element in our show.

We was finally ready to start shooting at roughly eleven. Because the other group had booked the studio out on the same day as we moved it all to the cooking room, we needed to be as quick as possible. We had some friends who was going to be our actors coming in at 1 so we asked the other group if any of them would be willing to step in and be actors. They was happy to do this. So at eleven we began practising, this was very important. We gave our actors a few minutes to look through the script and explained what the programme was all about.

The director sorted out all of the camera positions. We had one camera on the food at a low angle, one with a static shot of the presenter and chef and one camera that captured facial expressions and pan when they put items in the oven. This was the camera I was operating, so I had to adjust my pan to move quickly and smoothly because I didn't want to miss the shot when I was directed. As we didn't have an actual gallery the director had to whisper through the mic because otherwise it would of been heard on the film itself.

We did a few practices first so we could get used to the shots and so the actors could gain confidence, these practices were really good. So as a production team we felt we could go ahead with the final filming. We produced some real nice shots without the show. However we decided to do another one so we could pick and choose which one we would like to use for our final film. However when we was trying to put the film on the computer we noticed the film was in black and white. This truly gutted me as the rest was so good.

Overall I felt that we worked well within our own learning team and helped each other greatly during the final filming. Everyone was able to have a opinion about the look of the film. And I had great fun being a camera operator. Even though at first I thought taking the studio to another room would be too much but I feel it was all worth it as it looks really good at the moment.