Today was the last day of the Escape From The Hood project. We spent the day at the main base. One of the participants wasn’t at the BFI when we did our Arts Apprenticeship so we did that which was a Salsa lesson – that was pretty cool.

We also had a small amount of filming to do, as we felt there was a gap in our story line that needed filling. We spoke about what was needed and created a shot list for this. The group was then split, most the group went to do the shot list and then went into another room to do the filming.  Myself and another member of the group stayed with one of the adutls and continued with editing.

We concentrated on the title of the film, which we all decided to keep as the project name Escape From The Hood : An Urban Love Story.  I got a font from home called ‘Route 3’ for the title text and other text that appears in our film.

Overall the project has been really good and I can wait to see the final piece premiered on the big screen !!

Today was a simple day as we had the filming out the way and our Arts Award stuff were all done. We spent the day at the main base continuing to edit our film on Final Cut Express.

Today we shot the last of our film, but most the day was spent doing the post-production segment of making a film. I finished up the scene I started editing yesterday which was the ‘Newtons’ scene – when the girls are in the restaurant.

The piece I edited was then added to the ‘master’ timeline where all the edited scenes were already sitting. We did this so our bits and pieces would get jumbled up and accidently edited/ruined. Once that was done we had a mini premiere screening of what was edited thus far.

Trust me we really went out!! We created a film screening ambiance by turning of the lights and setting up the projector and the standing screen, along with the seats; and proudly watched our work. It was a really nice way to end a week of hard work and start of the weekend.

Our next session will be back at the BFI!!

Today we went out to shoot scene 2 of our drama.
As the numbers were down today, I had to be the director, camera person and the sounds person.
It was very intense, but we got it all done in the end.

After lunch we split into two groups – those that were left.
Two crew members and an actor went out to finishing shooting scene 7 and start scene 8.
Whilst I stayed indoors and started cracking down with the editing. This included sorting out footage on the other Mac Book that hadn’t been put into ‘bins’ and naming them. By the end of today’s session I got a minutes worth of out film edited. Though it sounds little, it’s about the detail and getting the sound and most importantly the cuts between each clip perfect!

Tomorrow, we finish shooting out film. As long as the weather holds up, and we should have more editing done.

Today was the real start to the course as Friday was the induction. We spent the day cracking down on the script of the short film – there’s no film without a script!

We decided on one out of the two ideas we had come up with on Friday and started discussing basic ideas and visuals. We came up with character names, traits and relationships. Once we had the basis of our plot and our characters jotted down we took the ideas to a script writing software called Celtx.

This piece of software was great to use as it had all need for the cast and crew integrated in the system; such as ‘action’, ‘scene -ext. or int.’ and ‘character’.

All we needed we’re the actors! As there are few of us we decided that the two males in the group would take the roles of the two male characters. As there are five females and three female roles needed we decided to call for an audition!

Here we are making the decision from the audition.

I was one of the casting directors and we had a our three candidates audition for each of the roles going. We gave them our printed script and had them go through the lines and then let them improvise to see how good they were for the roles going. By the end of the day we had our five characters ready for the next session.

Bring on the shoot!!