Filming

Before filming we encountered several problems, as the place we originally planned on filming was not available on the day and we had to find another location at the last minute. So instead of filming at Ashleigh's house we had to film at mine, which didn't match the RECCE photo's we had previously taken. So we took new photo's and adapted the previous ones to make them match. Also, due to the change of location, we were not able to get the child actor to participate in the film, due to my house being too far away with no suitable transportation. But we managed to adapt the film to suit the change and in the process actually make the film slightly more mysterious with more conventions of horror due to the ambiguity of not actually seeing 'Arabella'. 

The filming went relatively well and we did not encounter many issues once we got started. We used Ashleigh's DSLR camera due to the heavy demand for the school cameras and Ashleigh did the camera work and I helped the actors with their lines and adapted lighting and just generally directed the actors with the way I wanted the film to look. We managed to get all of the footage we wanted within an hour and a half and were generally happy with the way the film was looking.

However, the next day when Ashleigh brought the memory card into sixth form to begin editing, we could not find the footage on the memory card and discovered that the files had been corrupted when we had plugged the card into the card reader. We tried to recover the files in every way possible and took it to the technicians in the school who informed us that we would have to re-film as they could not get the footage back.

This technical problem set us back a few lessons as everybody else was editing their first cuts whilst we had no footage to edit. So we spent our time making an animated logo so we were not entirely wasting our lessons.

We got one of the school cameras and did several tests with converting the footage from the camera to the computer to make sure the files would not become corrupted and managed to get all of our actresses together again to re film a week later. The filming actually went better then the first time due to them being aware of the script and what they were supposed to be doing, so we didn't have to waste time learning lines and going over the way we wanted them to look. However, an issue we faced was that we were not able to hire a tripod from the library on that particular day so we had to adapt the shooting script to include quite a few hand held shots and find other ways to hold the camera still for the other shots. Fortunately, hand held camera shots are a convention of the horror genre so it was easy to overcome. We managed to import all of the footage onto the computer successfully and the footage was to a good standard that we were happy with.