Making our Swede

We decided to do a swede of the teenage comedy 'Mean Girls'. We chose this because we thought we would be able to recreate it using settings at school because it's set in an American high school and we liked the comedic potential it held.

We decided to swede the trailer of the film because it told the story in a condensed way and we thought the handheld camera effect would be easy to recreate.
Our group decided to use a phone to film the swede. This was a deliberate decision to create the handheld effect quickly and easily however I personally thought a DSLR would have been a better choice to film the steady shots so we could have got the best picture, lighting and a level, still picture rather than shaky shots through the whole trailer.

When we watched the trailer we saw that the whole thing is practically a montage. There are 34 separate scenes that make it up an they are all only seconds long, some only 2 or 3. This presented a challenge as there are a lot of different shots and locations that we have to film and the editing process is going to be difficult as we will have to pull so many short shots together in the right order.
There is also a voiceover which we have to film and get in time with the scenes further adding to the work and editing process.

First of all we made a cast list:
Cady - Drew
Regina - Abbie
Karen - Me
Gretchen - Jenny
Damien - Victor
Janis - Me
Aaron - Eldon

For any of the other characters that made brief appearances we either asked our friends to step in or just filmed it ourselves.

We then split the tasks in pre-production. I was given the task to write the script which was a challenging task as I had to watch the trailer so many times to catch all the lines that happened in quick succession. I also wrote the camera angles and stage directions on the script to make it as accurate as possible and easier for us to recreate. Unfortunately, the large number of camera angles and movement throughout the trailer made this a long and difficult process. Overall it took me about two and a half hours to finish.

In the next lesson we started to make a plan about when we were going to film, what shots we were doing, which characters are needed and the props required.

We started by listing every location we would need and grouped them together so we could film them all at once to make the filming process as easy and fast as possible. However, this was a longer process than we first imagined (because the trailer has so many different camera angles and locations) therefore I ended up finishing it off at home too. This took me just over an hour and twenty minutes.

When it came to the time to start filming Drew, our main character, was ill which disrupted our filming processes dramatically. Therefore we had to improvise to try and film all the scenes we could without her.
In our next filming slot we got quite a lot of scenes filmed but, with our order broken, we were just filming random scenes. We also decided to film the cafeteria scenes in a cafeteria full of people; this seemed like a good idea at first because it would make it look more natural and true to the film however, I fear the background noise will be loud and overpowering in the scene and members of our group became distracted by others in the room making the filming process very long.

Then Jenny was ill for the next filming session so we were limited on the scenes we could film. The great number of scenes we have to do added with the disruptions have made the filming process rushed and, frustratingly, all the camera angles I'd identified and written down were ignored - e.g. scenes where the camera angle repeatedly changed (different close-ups, two shots and establishing shots) were all just filmed in one go from one angle. The scenes were also not filmed with a great amount of preparation e.g. identifying where the light is coming from, setting up angles and making sure the sound is ok. I fear this may result in substandard footage where some scenes are dark and character's lines can't be heard properly.

I feel like the editing process is also going to be frantic as we had to film different parts of the swede on different phones so now the scenes are spread over 3 devices which makes it a more complicated process to upload the footage and leaves a large margin for error e.g. losing a scene.

Overall I hope this swede is going to come out well and that we'll be able to edit it on time.
Next time I'm filming anything I would definitely ensure we know the deadline so we're not rushing to finish and consequently sacrificing the quality of our footage to get it done. I would also definitely use a DSLR because then the shots would be of a higher quality, we would have the capability to adjust the depth of field and focus and the overall footage would be much steadier and easier to watch.

I think the difficulty of this trailer was highly underestimated in terms of time, resource and input required.