Following on from the planning of our Reservoir Dogs task, my group and I had just 50 minutes to do all the filming. The whole filming process was very rushed and panicked but we started well as everyone remembered what they needed to bring and got changed and ready quickly. Although our initial idea of using a bike for the dolly shot was no longer an option as a bike was no longer available to us. However we managed to find a trolley thing that was big enough to put the camera on the tripod in and was easy enough to push along, although this did make the shot quite wobbly as the camera wasnt that stable and the tarmac was quite uneven but it when put into slow motion the movement is less obvious and a wobbly dolly shot id better than no dolly shot at all.
One of the biggest I feel there is with our finished project is that the shots of the characters walking toward the camera clearly don’t show the whole group, they look quite empty and it creates a lot of issues with the continuity between the shot as people are in different places and the shots look more or less empty each time. Also we didn’t have time to practise and work out how to make the characters look like they’re moving towards the camera without them look like they’re getting any closer to it so in our finished project the characters get bigger and closer to the camera as they walk towards it which is different to the original. However I feel all of my group plush the two boys we asked to help played there characters very well and were as true as they could be to the original, which made the clips a lot better and made the whole projects a lot more similar to the original.
After the filming, we split into pairs from the group and in pair did our own edits. I feel the editing process was very successful, we used the footage we had well and closely observed the original clip to make sure the timings and sequence of shots and fonts and things were as close as we could get them to the clip we were copying. We managed to get the exact font used in the Reservoir Dogs opening and also matched the colour as closely as possible.
Overall with the amount of time we had for planning, filming and editing and the with the resources we had available to us, I feel we did a good job at recreating Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs opening. The only things i would do differently if i were to redo the task is to keep all the actors in the group in the places of their characters and move the camera to each one so the shots don’t look empty and I would also make sure we have a dolly to use for a smoother dolly shot at the start.
Megan Jackson's AS Media Studies Blog 