First Shoot

First Shoot

The first shoot we did was on location in the "Singing Sand Dunes" in the middles of the desert. We arrived at midday with the intention of filming a lot of the rover perspective shots. As you can see from the picture, the lighting was not perfect for the types of shots we wanted. After looking at the shots, we have realized that the golden hour would have been a better time as everything in sight would be bathed in a yellow/orange hue. This colour could have been enhanced in post production as well to make the setting feel more like a foreign planet. We also realized that this particular part of the desert was not as barren and empty as we would have liked. If you looked off into the distance you could see small structures and oil rigs which completely ruined the illusion that the film was set in outer space. In future shoots, we would definitely use another location.

Another issue we had was the equipment overheating. It was extremely hot on the day and I had to give my GoPro a break so it wouldn't overheat. The equipment we had included a DSLR, a GoPro, a boom mic, a digital camera, a tripod and a rotating selfie stick. The sun made it hard to see exactly whet we were shooting but we had a general idea. It was at this point where the main problem came to surface. Our rover which we showed in our previous posts would not drive on the rough terrain. Seeing as this was our main purpose of that particular shoot, we had to try and improvise.

One way we thought we could get around the problem was by getting me to move the rover manually with a large stick. We genuinely tried for half an hour to get this shot to work but it unfortunately did not. There was always either the stick or my head in the shot. This shoot has made us want to reevaluate our film idea as the issues with the rover and setting proved that this idea may be difficult to pull off in the allocated time given by the exam board. While we want to keep the sci-fi genre and general idea, we may need to change the amount of rover shots included and some plot points.