Task 2/3 - In-Camera Editing

For this task we did a bit of research on some films that involved the old editing method of "in-camera" editing. This method of editing was accidentally founded by George Melies when he was filming a street and  his camera stopped recording for a second. When he watched over what he had recorded that day he found that the effect was as if people just vanished into thin-air.

For the task we had to film something on our school grounds. We were told it should consist of a minimum of two actors/actresses and we were to think of a story.

After this we collected our camera and tripod and went outside to film our first practice footage. Our group consisted of 4 people: Me, Jess, Jordan and William.

We had an idea that was closely tied-in with George Melies' film of the vanishing lady, except we didn't have any props to use. To substitute for not having anything we came up with the idea that one of the groups actors had magical powers that could make people vanish out of thin-air. We couldn't add any special effects into the film that we made as we were tasked with only editing inside the camera, but we did our best to exaggerate what would have happened with Jordan's powers.

I didn't take any pictures of recordings of our group whilst we were making that film as we were short on time and this was our first film that we possibly ever made, so we had to get used to the camera and how to set up the tripod.

I think that it turned out quite well for our first clip. The things that went well for us was the timing. It was near alright but we could have done better. The acting was very basic and stale but we aren't experienced in that section and we will hopefully improve with time. The recording went well but we noticed that there were several times when the camera had shifted a bit in the recording making it very obvious that we made some changes to our "set". Another error we noticed was that I started to record a bit earlier than I was supposed to as the viewer can clearly hear Jessica's voice in several scenes.