After we finished shooting both interviews of the film, the main part of the film has been formed. The structure and the flow are now very clear and only require the subtitles and the appropriate B-roll footages. However, the introduction and the ending of our film became the biggest problem.

 

The introduction and ending both requires a huge amount of footages to illustrate the information from Samantha’s voiceover, and finding these footages was not very easy. The main purpose of our introduction is to tell our audience why we are doing this topic based on “authentic Chinese food”, and also to lead them into the main film, therefore we will need footages from daily life, such as having meals with friends, cooking at home and so on. These are the things we need to shoot and add in. To make it look more natural, we also decided to use some footage we previously shot during our daily life so we don’t have to find our friends and “act” some of the scenes just for the introduction. In my opinion, it is better to keep it real and having the person acting natural in front of the camera.

 

This problem we are having can come down to the imperfection in planning. Because the plan we had was not good enough and we did not think through everything we are now lacking footages for editing. During the planning we always thought that we could go with what we receive in the interview so we will not need to plan too much for the shooting. What we did not know was the introduction and ending needed planning or a storyboard so we will know how much scenes we need to shot. This is an important piece of experience for us being media practitioners so we can learn from the failure and avoid such mistakes in the future of our film making career.