My Animals & Other Family - Shoot #1 (Open Day) 20/10/13

On the 20th October, we travelled down to Peterborough for our first shoot. This shoot was mainly for me to get a feeling of the place, and understand the layout, and therefore get ideas on some shots myself. We also took the chance to get some general shots and cutaways, and also seeing as it was an opening day for the refuge, it was an opportunity to get shots of the public wandering around and seeing the animals. The reason we did this on this date was because it is rare for the refuge to have open days, and the next one after this day was after Easter next year, so we chose this day to see if we could capture anything whilst the public where visiting. 

The shoot itself was also a good opportunity for me to learn the XF100 camera, as I hadn't used it previously. I'd mainly used DSLR cameras within previous projects, however enjoyed the fact I was able to learn about new equipment. 

I definitely enjoyed experiencing the refuge for the first time. It had been some time since I'd filmed in a documentary sense, so it was fun to get back into this mind set and capture things in such a style. We managed to capture some shots of the public wandering around, as an extra piece of footage, but not many, as there weren't many people visiting at the time we were there. 

The main area we filmed in during this shoot was the reptile house, where we managed to get shots of the smaller snakes, lizards and other animals whilst they were being fed mice. 

The shooting of the animals being fed was mainly done on shoulder mount set up because it was easier for me to get up close to the animals as they were eating, and allowed me to work more with the new camera and it's set up, which was great experience. It wasn't too different from DSLR which I found helpful, however I enjoy the fact that it's HD quality, which made the need to capture perfect shots even more exciting. 

During the shoot, I was separated from the sound recordist (we had camera sound during this time, which wasn't an important feature to capture at this moment in time, as we were just doing general and cutaway shots which didn't require specific sounds), and they managed to capture some atmospheric sounds with the birds and monkeys, which Hannah stated, would most likely be needed mainly for the major project.

Overall, I feel the shoot went well, it was a nice experience to look around the area, and feel we got some good shots of the surrounding areas. In the future, I feel it would be a good idea to get another camera operator to help with the different range of shots (one with a tripod and one with a shoulder mount) to make the most of interviews, as you can have station mid-shots and movement shots when they are moving around and working whilst talking to the camera.

Here are some screen grabs (from my online Dropbox - therefore not the best quality) of some of the footage we captured on this day: