H.P. - Brighton Trip Reflection

From our recent group location reccie in Brighton, the following points about our footage, shooting style, group relationship and concept development became apparent:

• Our filming style benefits from more developed planning than we gave to this reccie, a very important factor to note when planning our final video.
• We take extra care to keep continuity strong throughout our shots. For example some shots featured higher or lower in camera exposure than others, meaning that our base footage varies in brightness. This is a factor that can be fixed in post production to some extent, but becomes more difficult the further the brightness varies. In some cases parts of shots were blown out too far and may be very difficult to recover in the edit.
• This lack of continuity also presents itself in the movement of our camera, with some shots locked down on a tripod and others very obviously handheld. A better technique would have been to use the tripod to stabilise the handheld shots by holding the tripod up and opening the legs for stability, not locking down the shot but giving extra weight to the bottom of the camera and a wider base to hold the camera, removing the unpleasant 'jitter' that comes from a true handheld shot.

Despite these issues I believe we were quite successful in surveying the location fully and testing out potential shot styles for our final production.

• We used a good variety of shot lengths, angles and movement types to capture a wide range of subjects in the town and on the beach. These included close ups of Kurtis and of seagulls, and long shots of the beach and pier.
• A few of the locations found in the town have some potential for our final production. One that jumped out at me was a shop called the 'Dirty Blonde'. It has a distinct retro theme and could provide some enjoyable visual comedy when coupled with our main protagonist, who has blonde hair.

The reccie has progressed our concept by allowing us to give consideration to outside locations. Previously we had been only looking at singular, inside locations, but we now have a developing idea to use a wider variety of locations, with both interior and exterior settings.