Contingency Plan

It was vital we produced a contingency plan prior to the shooting of our film to identify any problems we may come across and are able to solve them effectively ensuring we stuck to the deadline. As we had both had experience of creating a plan during our BTEC course last year we had an idea of where to start and what needed to be included. There were also text books which we used to help us remember the general layout and content.

We came up with two separate plans initially, listing problems we may come across and suggestions of what we would do if we came up against a specific problem. For example, we were worried that the video camera would not clearly pick up the sound of the actors talking. An idea to overcome this problem was to check the footage after the first piece of filming and make sure all the actors spoke clearly. Once we had completed our separate lists we brought them together and talked about what we had come up with. This was important to carry out as Beth came up with ideas that I hadn't thought of and vice versa.

This is a copy of an initial contingency plan we came up with initially:




Problems included use and responsibility of cameras, lighting and sound problems as well as getting all of the actors together in one place at the same time.

On the day of filming we took the contingency plan to the location in an attempt to allow the filming to run smoothly as we only had a limited amount of time due to our actors other commitments and our own deadline. Although it looks very basic it was useful on the day of filming and kept us on track and luckily it helped us overcome some problems. For example, the lighting wasn't great inside the house at our location as it was dark outside. To solve this I added some more lamps around the room. Although it still was not the perfect solution it worked to an extent and in turn made our short film appear better and more professional.