Whilst producing my product, I ran into a few problems throughout the duration of production and post-production that affected my final product and schedule.
One of these problems came in the production stage when I was filming. On the first day of recording, I decided to film all the shots that involved the interior of the characters house inside a dark room, and using various amounts of lighting to keep the shots bright. As my lighting isn’t the best I could have used, a large amount of shots that were produced on this day couldn’t be used as they were all too dark to see anything and this meant that I would have to record all of these shots again, as well as the other shots that I needed to record outside. This problem led me to decide that my lighting wouldn’t be fit enough to use for the outcome of the product, so I decided that when I would film my exterior shots outside, I would also film my interior shots with in the same natural light to make sure that no problems with lighting would be caused again. On a warm and sunny day, I recorded the exterior shots that I had been planning to record and I also recorded the interior shots in the natural light, which meant that the footage I produced light and viewable.
Also during the production stage, I found that two shots were quiet difficult to produce, despite how simple in concept they are. These are the shots that are totally in the dark, with the character looking into a mirror with a low shining light above him. As simple a concept as these are, it took a few days to be able to produce these. I first created a box using black card to produce the shot in, so that I could use any light that would be easiest to work with. The first try I had at completing these shots, there was not enough light entering the box so that the contents could be seen, making the shots dark and unusable. I then tried filming these shots in a different location in more bright light, with a light being pointed in through a hole in the top. These shots did work but when looking through the footage, I found that the background and camera could be seen reflected in the mirror shot, so I needed to film these again. I practised with some different angles to try and hide the background but this didn’t work, so I came up with the idea of using another sheet of black card and holding it by the side of the camera to hide all reflections in the mirror, showing just the black background. When I looked through these shots, I felt that they were better than I had anticipated and they were useable for my final product.
One small problem that occurred while filming was that the legs on the figures were small so a large amount of the time, the characters had to be blu-tacked down to the ground so they didn’t fall. But this meant that the blu-tack is visible throughout a large amount of production, which ruins the illusion that the figures are people and not just objects. This would be something I would improve on throughout the whole product if I had more time to film these shots again.
The post-production stage also held some problems that needed to be solved, but not as many as the production stage.
One of the major problems that occurred was that when I first exported the product, the soundtrack didn’t match precisely with the visuals as they had done when I was editing the product. This was a problem because some shots had specific lyrics in the song that they needed to match to. It took a number of times for me to play with the export settings to make sure that the sound would match with the visuals that it needed to. Once these settings had been saved, it made it easier to export without any problems occurring in future exports of the edits of the product.
Another small problem that occurred while editing is that the footage that I had recorded didn’t fill all the time of the song. This was due to the stop motion pieces only lasting a few seconds rather than taking up a five to ten second slot. This was easily sorted out by using some spare footage and the same sky shots to fill these spaces so that the rest of the video would remain in the same time frame as I had planned and reach the end of the song.
Adam Widdowson 