Shot by shot remake of 'Killers' - My experience

I had a great time filming and editing our remake video, it gave me the opportunity to drastically improve my filming and editing skills by doing practical work which I have never had the chance to practice before. Overall I was pleased with the work of my group and I and feel that our joint efforts resulted in an impressive  first attempt outcome.

I felt that we created replicas of all the shot types precisely, for example our over the shoulder shots were positioned well and looked very similar to those in the original film. I feel that the mis-en-scene created in our remake got the storyline across, creating a similar atmosphere to that in the film. However, our final product is not without it's faults, I have picked up on many aspects that need to be improved and practiced before we produce our final Thriller opening.

The main issue that we had was with the lighting, as we were filming at around 4 pm it started to gradually get darker during the filming. We were not filming the shots in chronological order and therefore the lighting does not comply with the events in the final clip. To compensate for the daylight, when it got darker we used a flash light, however this did not create the same effect as having natural daylight.

 When watching the original film opening and creating our storyboard, we didn't take notes that were detailed enough to know exactly what should be going on in each shot. This caused some confusion and as a result we were not able to get every single shot we should have and piece them together with ease. Next time we are going to make much more detailed notes, including the characters facial expressions and actions etc.

We had a few other minor faults; we did not always say 'action' and 'cut' and when we did they may not have been correctly timed, this resulted in some talking over the action going on in the scene. Because of this we had to mute our clip which made it slightly less effective at points although other points were meant to be muted. We were so busy preparing everything else that we forgot it's the small details that count! For example, we should have used a tour guide of France as the book left on the bench but the best I could find without preparing was a French language book... which looks a bit silly to be honest. I also noticed that the clip is meant to be in France however there were London buses driving past in the background!

We couldn't access the original soundtrack of Killers so we tried our best to imitate the music used ourselves by using a love song at first followed by tension building music as the action starts to unfold. On a whole I think that our final product has turned out to be effective despite it's faults. The experience was surely useful and I have learned a lot of skills that I will apply next time we make a clip and to pour final Thriller opening.