Week One
In this week we were given the script of the show we would be doing. There was four groups, each group given a script of either a British script, which was Inside No.9 or an American script which was Friends. My group was given Friends Season 1 Episode 1. To start of, we each picked the character we wanted to play and read through the scene. We then watched the episode to looks at the different characteristics of our characters and how to characterize them in our way. After this we blocked out the scene we kept running through it to start to memorize our lines. We also discussed how we would position set and camera.
Week Two
This week we spent a lot of time rehearsing our scene episode as we are filming next week. We discussed our characters and the kind of relationships they have to help us interact with each other. My character, Chandler Bing, is best friends with Beetle’s character, Joey Tribbianni, so they were both very sarcastic and bounced off each other when it comes to bullying Monica about her date. We also began to discuss the different camera angles we wanted in more detail to finalize the placement of our set as well as blocking where our characters sit during the different scenes. Doing this helped our rehearsal time because this meant we wouldn’t have to change any placement of set in the episode on the day of recording. Finally, this week we looked into our characters costuming. As Friend’s was set in the 90s it was a little harder to find an outfit that was close to their fashion but I think we managed to create similar costumes with the modern style keeping as close to our character as possible.
Week Three
As we are filming this week, we are spending all of our last rehearsal time going through the script and running over each scene to ensure we all knew our lines and finding any last minute props we needed such as cups, a telephone, cookies and packets of sugar. This week we also had a production meeting to discuss our production plan and any changes that needed to be made with out production team which is the other group also doing an episode of Friends. As a group, we discussed the idea of cutting lines to make the episodes shorter to ensure that we would have enough time to film as much as the episodes as possible. My group ultimately decided to keep our full episode as it was a lot shorter compared to the other groups who did decide to cut some of their lines to make their episode a little shorter. We also discussed lighting, to show different locations. We needed a warmer lighting while we were in the café and a cooler lighting for when we are back at Monica’s apartment as well as needing background noise for the tv playing in the back, the show needed to be in Spanish to replicate the episode a little better. When we were filming we spent a lot of time setting up the cameras and the set before we actually began filming. The filming was very start stop as we had to retake scenes from different angles and make changes as we went on which meant that in the end we only managed to get half the episode done, but overall I think the process went well and once we finish editing the scenes, I think the final product is something we will be very proud of.
Week Four:
This week we got our videos back from Tv studio and began editing. We started watching through the different clips, and took our favourite ones and started to add them together. We had to figure out how to crop scenes at the right time to ensure that we didn’t cut off any lines and used a clip of ‘Friends’ theme song to blend the clips together more seamlessly. I found editing quite difficult even after we were shown how to use at we had to clip and piece scenes together and it made the process very stop start. I did like getting the taste of the experience of putting together a show, as that is something I have considered wanting to do in my career, but I’d need a deeper understanding of it first. The most difficult part was cutting sound and lining up with another clip. We took my line from one clip, and zoomed in on the other take and tried to overlap the lines so it was in time which was very time consuming and it annoyed us all a little as whatever we tried to do, the line just wouldn’t match up.
