Zara Yaffe

These pictures are of screenshots of the scenes of blood (food colouring) dripping into water and also photos of me actually filming them too at a later date after reviewing the first recordings. I filmed these in my grandparents’ flat as they had the equipment I needed to use such as the food colouring itself, the large vase, clean and clear white background and the tool I used to drip the red food colouring into the water. Initially, I found this difficult to film. This is due to the fact we needed to work out what looks good, i.e. how many drops to do in a certain length of time. Once we had worked this out, it wasn’t too hard to film. Before I had even begun to film the very first shots which were prior to the shown screenshots below, I had a black background rather than the white that you can see. It looked dull, unappealing to the eyes and extremely unprofessional. The black background looked as though I hadn’t tried to make it look good or to a professional standard which the project is all about. The red food colouring got lost in the black background and therefore I had to change it and make it white. This exercise was essential in testing which would look better in order for to make my opening title sequence to a professional standard that is visually appealing and is able to keep an audience interested in what they are viewing. I feel that in the actual title sequence I had created where I had edited everything together and finalised my piece, the slow motion of the blood dripping, diffusing and dispersing through the water really shows contrast in comparison to the music I have chosen which is thriller-like, which is the genre of my title sequence. I first filmed these shots in a too low of a resolution therefore these came up in a low sharpness which then needed to be redone as it was completely blurred when it came to viewing them afterwards. You can see this in the screenshots. The lighting in these shots was dim, almost a yellow colour and clearly false which could be due to the fact that we were filming in winter meaning natural light isn’t so bright. Another challenge I came across was the different angles of shooting. You can see in some of these pictures that the camera is not on the tripod and is on household items. This is how I overcame and resolved the angle problem and also the frame resolution issue in the next shoot. This reason for this is because the tripod was too tall for it to be put on the table at an angle at which the footage could be seen close up. Zooming in would not be efficient in this case as it would begin to blur rather than stay in full focus and so under these circumstances these household items gave me the angle and height I needed to be able to record and film in a way at which the footage was suitable for the look I intended to go for. These photos also show me sitting on the floor with the camera on the tripod which is beneficial as I could then record a low angle shot of the food colouring dripping into a vase. Originally, in the first shots I recorded, I held the camera and tried to keep as still as possible so that as a result I could get exactly the angle I wanted. These came up on the computer as shaky, jolting at some points and didn’t look as good as I had originally anticipated. I overcame this challenge by using different items that would keep the camera still rather than my hands as it looks better visually and doesn’t look unusually unprofessional. I felt that in order to create suitable footage I would have to record at different angles accordingly so it would be visually appealing for the audience. The constant repetitiveness of these shots would be boring and tiring to look at and would lose focus of the audience if it was all at the same angle and thus these different angles keep the audience’s attention. The different shots could perhaps suggest or represent the actor’s different outlook of what is happening.

Zara Yaffe

Zara Yaffe