R+P Post 29: Rehearsals

In preparation for our upcoming rehearsals week we have met with the other two media groups and together we have separated the available studio time equally in order to produce the timetable on the right. Our sessions are denoted in orange and initially I was slightly concerned by the blocked nature of our sessions as it means that if there is a significant issue with one of our scenes, we will have little to no time to correct or improve them.



Therefore, in addition to this timetable, I have also created our own personal timetable (left) that outlines what we will be doing in each session and then we color coded our availability using the key underneath. This schedule will ensure that we are always using the time as effectively as possible and will also prevent us from an unbalanced time per scene management.

In hindsight, I think that scheduling of our sessions were perfect as it allowed us Monday to prepare and then both Thursday and Friday to reflect on our footage and the choices we had made during those two days of rehearsals. Furthermore, by having some really intensive and lengthy sessions it allowed us to really get involved and concentrated on the projects whereas the other groups said that they had found it difficult to get stuck in, during some of there shorter sessions.

Overall the rehearsals went very well and we worked productively throughout, however we did face multiple challenges as well as some large cinematographic questions.

The first of these issues was the lighting in our paper scene. Although we had initially chosen and planned to use infinite white we used this rehearsal opportunity to test this lighting effect as well as other potential set-ups. These various image below show the variety of tests we did and the reasoning behind each of them.

Although the purpose of trying these further style was to strengthen our confidence in using the infinite white, we have ended up feeling less sure of idea than before. Instead, we are considering adapting our idea to the deep blue set-up. In order to overcome this slight setback we have decided to do some audience and teacher feedback to help give us some TA information and guidance.

Here is the questionnaire that we asked people to complete.

Here is a list of the various different repeated comment both for and against each of the scenes. As you can see the points for image two are much closer to our intend effect and therefore we will continue to use the infinite white set-up.

The second, and arguably the most significant problem was with our UV face paint set-up. We spent quiet a large section of our time this week doing several different test with the paints, trying multiple different color combinations and light positions. Despite this, after seeing the footage we are strongly questioning the idea. This is because the we do not feel the connotations are clear enough and the link to the other scenes is not significant enough.

After weighing up the various different consequences, we have decided to scrap this concept. There are several risks in doing this, the most significant being that by taking out roughly a third of the whole video, we could be left with insufficient footage and therefore a stagnant and boring video. Despite this, we feel that including the footage would be more damaging to our project and there are still precautions we can take in order to bulk out our video. The video on the left is a timelapse of me testing the make-up on one of our actors.


Our last, and smallest tweaking point was to do with our performance. Here is a video of one of test shots from later on in the week.

Looking back at this footage we are all confident that we will have a strong and convincing band, because we all look natural and we gel well. However, we do feel that Luke, Shay and myself could use some choreographed moves that we could fall back on, when we left unsure of what to do.