Filming

Day One:

On the first day of filming we had only two hours to film before we had to get back to school for our next lessons, so we had to work quickly. By the time we had gotten the filming equipment, caught the bus to Legjenda's house and Legjenda got into her costume, half an hour had gone.

Once we got there, we realised the house wasn't dark enough to make it look like it was night, but that problem was solved quickly by drawing the curtains and we started to film the bathroom scenes. In practice it proved to be difficult to film the mirror scene inside the bathroom without the camera being seen, so we decided to place the camera at the door of the bathroom, where we could still get a good shot of the mirror and not see the camera in the reflection.

After getting some good shots, we moved on to the next scenes. We did the match-on-action stairs scenes, which were easy to shoot and quickly finished. Next, we shot the scene where Legjenda goes into the bedroom, using a match-on-action shot. The fact that the door creaks loudly was an advantage as it helped add to the eerie, supernatural feel and the match-on-action technique worked well after a few attempts. Our work was curtailed at that point as it was time to get back to school and filming was over for a while.

Day Two:

We only had a few more scenes to shoot and again only had a few hours to shoot them in. We shot the point of view shot a couple of times before we achieved it successfully at a steady pace and angle. The stairs conveniently creaked as I walked down them, which added effectively to the build up of tension.

Our final scene, where Legjenda's reflection comes out of the mirror and goes up the stairs to Legjenda's room, took us a while to film as we had to make it look continuous. The final shot, where we had to zoom into Legjenda's face and then shift swiftly to the lamp, was difficult as the zooming and shifting was difficult to synchronise. It took us about ten tries before we finally did it right.

The only scenes left for us to film were the exterior shots which we had to wait for darkness to film, and the shots of the moon. That night Legjenda shot the exterior shots of her walking into the estate.

Day Three:

After uploading the footage onto the Macs, it became apparent that we needed more scenes of Legjenda walking into the house and sitting down, instead of jumping straight from the outside scenes into the bathroom shots. Accordingly, Legjenda and I went back to her house that night and shot the extra scenes, without any difficulty and using the night-time ambiance to our advantage.

Editing

Day 1:
We finally finished filming so were ready to upload our two minute film onto the Mac computer. A key task was to mark the INS and OUTS of the vital parts of the shots. This had to be done accurately for it to be continuous and have a sense of verisimilitude. This was our rough draft so we could identify the usable footage. This didn't take very long because, as a result of the time we invested in the planning process, we didn't make many mistakes during filming.

Editing

Day 2:

We started off by sorting the sections of footage into the correct order, checking if we needed more footage at the beginning or end of each section. We came to the conclusion that by using just a few seconds more recording of the mirror in Legjenda's bathroom, we could make the reflection look like it is still in the mirror. This took us a long time and we had to wait till next lesson to finish the editing process.

Editing

Day 3:

We spent a long time trying to get the mirror shot perfect as it was the main event and turning point of the narrative. It proved difficult getting it precise as we had to also change the contrast of the shots so when put together it would flow seemlessly. During this time, I was also producing the production logo, adding movement and sound to make it more professional and unique.

Editing

Day 4:

We added cross dissolve effects in between the shots to achieve smoother transitions which would enhance the continuity of our film. We added the production logo which I had been working on and made it just a bit shorter. During this time, Legjenda was beginning to work on the musical soundtrack for Beyond Reflection.

Once it was all put together, however, we discovered that our film was too long for 3 minutes. As a consequence, we had to go over everything again and edit out the parts that could be eliminated without being detrimental to the flow and storyline of the film. Primarily, we cut out the shots of  Legjenda going up the stairs in the dark, as this was deemed not strictly necessary. We also added the shots of the moon twice: at the beginning and at the end the create narrative circularity.

Music

For the evocative, thriller type music we knew we wanted, we settled on Garage Band as our first choice. Firstly, I went through to eliminate what was not useful for our film. During this process, I began to see the opportunities of chosing a few sounds which we could use for the film, then I tried putting them together to make a score relevant to the part of the film sequence which it was to be accompany. This was quite a hard process and required some tweaking. I repeated this twice so it would be long enough as it would be better to be too long than too short, this would make a lot of other complications.

Editing

Day 5:

Today we were ready to add the music to the film. We had slow quiet music in the beginning, then blended in the louder, spookier music towards the end at the point when the reflection starts to come out of the mirror. We did this to build up anticipation and create suspense, exploiting the dramatic irony that the audience would be waiting for something to happen.

We also added the the titles to the film, making them the appropriate size, font and graphological effect appropriate to the mood of tension and terror characteristic of our genre. We also made up the other character names, which were the names of famous actors/actresses to add another level of intertextuality.