Directors Journal - By Syed Hussain

Filming: 23rd October

Today we started the filming of our short film ‘Out of Control’. Having picked the cast and set out the crew we were well organised and prepared for the task ahead. I (Syed) took on the job as director as I bought the idea forward and chose the character for our film. I decided to give Chris Phillipou the camera as I felt he had a keen eye for perfection and was good with bringing out angles. I also set Atul Sharma as the editor as we both felt it would suit his role perfectly. As our film was mainly based in the main school site we had to be accurate with our filming and couldn’t be off time. Before we started filming we had got all our actors in costume with their make up and also got all our props ready. After setting up the location we set forth to start our filming.

We shot the first scene in the common room as we were able to get it out of the way and let the school main site clear out. Having waited for the school to clear out, it had become 3:30 and we were on course to finish before 7:00 which was our filming deadlines for the site. Having shot the opening scene we looked over our current footage and went over some shots to make it better and give us a range of shots to choose from when editing.

As we went through each scene we had to set up the equipment properly and in a place where it would bring the best out of the scene. During the filming we had to constantly keep changing our angles and retake shots because of interference from unwanted quests. We used many shots to keep the audience intrigued and connected to the film with close up’s and exposing sounds; it helped them be apart of the film.

As the director I had to constantly keep an eye out for mistakes and keep it perfect within each scene, and to make sure I used the right elements in the right places to make it look good. A major strength with me being the director was that I was on good terms with the actors so it was easy to communicate and make the film better, we were pretty good with our filming with the only problem being near the end of our filming when the cleaners we interrupting in the scenes and background.