Filming In 'Mr Simms' Sweet Shop

'Mr Simms' Sweet Shop

For the health and safety issues from this shoot please click link. 

This particular part of that days shoot was not part of the plan that we had initially come come with, however as a group we thought it provide some nice footage. because we had not thought in advance of shooting here we had to adapt our plan to fit around this location, also considering health and safety.

So, as mentioned in the previous post, the first thing we had to do before thinking about anything else, was ensuring we had permission to film inside, otherwise any planning would have been useless.
After this, we had a quick look around the store to see what shots would best to get and how we could make the most of the time we had in here. We noticed that the lighting was quite interesting, so thought that for one set of shots, experimenting with the white balance, aperture, shutter speed etc would be worth doing.

Here is a short clip showing how different the lighting looked after we had changed these setting.


oxford sweet shop 1 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


I put the two clips of each setting, capturing the same footage next to each other in this clip, in order to show the difference in lighting. The first half of this clip, a had a noticeable orange tint to the lighting. (the settings on that particular piece of footage were, Aperture: f/22.5, Shutter Speed: 1/500, ISO: 3200 and White Balance: 8000k). To amend this, we left the aperture and shutter speed as they were but changed the ISO setting to 64 and the White Balance to 2500. These were the settings for the second half of the above clip (changes at 0.04seconds). These differences in settings made a drastic change as you can see, making the lighting look much better.

The footage below is some further experimentation with angles and settings. Immediately below we have a short clip of zooming into the centre of the candy canes, we thought this could potentially create an interesting effect. As you can see from the fact the footage is not very steady, we used a hand-held technique and used a zoom lens. The hand-held technique is conventional of the new wave so in this regard we can link it to our brief.  As you can see, the effect got from this test, was a focus shift, the begging of the shot began with the entire area being in focus and as we zoom closer the aperture settings automatically changed, giving us focus in the centre and out of focus around the edge suggesting we changed to around an f/22.



MVI 6396 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.



This piece of footage below has some link to the new wave as we are getting a reflection of ourselves in the shop window. Although this was not initially intentional, we kept hold of and made use of the footage to show a slight lack in continuity, which is often found in the films of the new wave movement. This could be due to limited budget meaning that reshooting was not possible or it could have been an intended technique to show a strong difference between the films if the new wave directors and mainstream Hollywood movies.
Overall, this is not the best shot we could have achieved, the framing appears to be off balance and the reflect means that it is hard to focus on the main foreground image.


MVI 0628 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.