The Practical Blog

The girls on camera Getting the title card shots For our final day of filming, we went to my house after school. The Dapper Stork team and Conor walked there after school, whereas Aneurin got to my house a bit later because he had further to get. We started off by getting a few establishing  of my house o use for the opening title card. The weather was nicer at the beginning then it was when we filmed downtown, but it turned grey fairly fast, so the shots look consistent with what we filmed earlier. Filming went smoothly, and it was a relaxed experience, more so then it had been before in town. Now all we have to to is edit the shots and do the finishing touches. I'm excited to be reaching the end of our project after so much work. Our makeshift tripod Behind the shots At the train station An establishing shot of the railway tracks Waiting on the train Jay's opening shots

Due to a technical error, the media that we recorded last Wednesday wasn't actually recorded, so today, Monday 3rd of April, we're going into town to reshot the scenes downtown with Aneurin and Conor. Both boys are available to redo our shots and at least this time Conor can bring a whole costume instead of just his shirt. The weather will be sort of the same, and we'll be able to use the same location. We need to remember to get some establishing shots of City Hall too. -- Keeping Aneurin warm between shots Dapper Stork Cinema vs the Elements The god-awful weather So, we redid our filming yesterday, in the same space as last time, but it was really miserable weather, and started to rain. The last time we filmed, it started to rain lightly, but then died off, so we decided to wait it out and just start filming anyway.  But, Mother Nature wasn't on our side, and the rain only got worse. We tried to film anyway, but things were getting very cold and ver...

Caoimhe isn't actually present on any of our filming days, I shot her cameo myself on my phone a few weeks ago when we were rehearsing for the show we were in. She doesn't have any lines other then giggling, so it didn't take long, and she was very eager to help. I took a few shots, and have embedded both of them here into this post. We'll film myself as Gemma on the next Wednesday of filming so that I have time to put on makeup and a costume. We need a fake Facebook account for 'Oscar' to use, so I made one using photos of Conor and some of my own photos with Conor in them. It had to purposefully look vague, as 'Oscar' isn't real, and there isn't enough of him to flesh out an actual page. For his status, I wrote 'Style, not sincerity', a quote from the original play that we originally considered as a movie title, before settling on EARNEST. Here's a screenshot of the fake account we created for 'Oscar' to use...

Left to right: Jane, Conor, Cliona, Jennifer On Wednesday 29th of March, Dapper Stork Cinema started filming our short movie, EARNEST. After school, the team and Conor, our actor for the character of Jay, went to Dunmurry train station to get the 3:45 train to Great Victoria Street. From there, we headed to City Hall, where we met up with Aneurin, our actor for Alistair. We choose a bench to the side of the main building, where it was quiet enough to film in peace. We were scared the weather would turn on us at first, but it stayed mercifully dry for the filming period. Jane on Camera Conor got changed into his red shirt on the train, but Aneurin only had to get to City Hall from his school, Inst, so he had enough time to get changed in his school bathrooms. Both actors took our desired colour schemes on board and dressed as they saw accordingly. Conor and Aneurin We filmed a shot on the train of Jay travelling, but other than that, we didn't film much at first. Cono...

Alphonso - as seen at the beginning of EARNEST Every film production company needs a company name, if they're to be taken seriously. We, of course, want to be taken seriously. Cinema is our passion. We have a lot of big personalities in our team, and so we went through a lot of name suggestions for our company. Jane would've liked something in Irish, whilst Cliona wanted to name it after a musical. Jennifer loves sharks and wanted one to feature in at least the logo, and I like puns. I wanted a pun. A screenshot of the winning name Because we couldn't all agree on any one idea, we decided that no one was getting what they wanted, and that we had to come up with something totally different from anything we originally planned. That way, we were all happy (well, none of us were happy, but at least we all felt the same way) We looked up a name generator to help us along, and upon clicking 'generate' we saw the name for us. Dapper Stork Entertainment. T...

Sometimes certain events or sounds reoccur in a multitude of different movies or TV shows, eg, playing the "Jaws" theme tune when someone is sneaking up on someone else, or a character is sunglasses walking in slow motion away from a huge explosion. This is known as a trope. Tropes can be comedic or dramatic, and most of the audience will recognise a trope they see from something else they've seen before. Tropes can be criticised as cliches, or used ironically in satire. We're going to be using a variation of the "Dream Weaver" trope, which originated from the cult classic movie Wayne's World.  The trope consists of a character, usually a main character, seeing someone very attractive. The camera goes soft focus, there are some sparkly visual effects, and music is heard playing softly in the background, normally, "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright, hence the name. We'll be using this trope twice, for the brief appearances of Gemma an...

It's come to light that the original date we had for filming wouldn't work for our two actors; Connor is working and Aneurin has a test the next day, and isn't allowed to go out. We're having to reschedule our plans. Originally, we changed the date to the 8th of April, but that would be too late for proper editing. It's going to have to be some day after school this week, between the 28th - 31st of March. Connor can come down town after school on the Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday, Aneurin can do the Wednesday, which is the 29th. This presents a new set of problems for filming the first scenes in my house - We can shoot the scenes downtown after school, but it'd be too dark afterwards to shoot the opening scenes of my street. We're going to need two separate filming days, and this splits up our team. The weather for Wednesday the 29th The weather isn't as good this week as the week we originally intended, but it should be decent. So long as it doe...