The "Not So Great" Clips

There were a lot of clips we recorded that I was incredibly displeased with. Whether they were planned or not, a lot of them were very underwhelming. For example, the clips that were supposed to be at the very beginning of the film were both underwhelming, as we only filmed them in 1-3 takes and didn't take as much care as we had in other shots.

Both scenes were incredibly slow, and not filmed the way I would've wanted them. Because we'd run out of time, we rushed these scenes which lead to their less than favorable quality. The first scene was supposed to be a tracking shot with a dolly effect, following our character into the store. Well, we didn't follow her into the store, and didn't bother to retake it because our parents were ready to pick us up at this point.

The second scene was supposed to follow the first, where we see our character browsing through selections in the store. This shot was supposed to be a wide shot, establishing the location of the book store. However, as we were filming at the literal front of the store, it was very difficult to get a good wide shot without someone walking in front of the camera or someone walking through the area we were filming. This shot took around 5 or more takes, and even after that the result was lackluster.

The other shot we got that I didn't enjoy was an interaction between the characters that we'd originally written in our script. The interaction was written out, along with the clip being scrapped completely and replaced with a separate interaction. The shot was supposed to be an over the shoulder, showing our character apologizing to the other for running into them. There was going to be a reaction shot (another over the shoulder), but after seeing the outcome of this shot, we wrote the OTS shots out entirely.

This is how the shot looked, and you can see why we didn't use it.

This taught me that even when you have a solid shot written out and planned, you can dislike the outcome during production, and it's okay to scrap footage and start again. While replanning and reorganizing shots is okay, the amount of times we had to do it this day was unexpected and very frustrating, which made me realize how unprepared we were. However, even if we'd been more prepared, scrapped film would've been inevitable, as not every shot will be perfect or add to the film in the way we think.