The camera man had experience with photography and cameras, allowing him to easily film shots. A Nikon D3100 was used to manually focus shots since automatic focus was unreliable. A tripod with a level bubble was used to create steady shots, and the camera was sometimes placed on the camera man's shoulder to smoothly zoom out. Audio was captured using the camera's built-in mic, which filtered out wind noise below 20 Hz. For night filming, portable flood lights and street lamps provided lighting, while spilled water on the ground acted as reflectors to increase visibility with limited natural light. Color grading in editing software made night scenes cooler like in American Gangster.

1. Equipment
The camera man for this film opening, being a photography student as well as well as someone that knows there way
around camera quite well, filming this opening came pretty natural to them and shots, camera movement, camera
shake, etc. was all very good and very easy to edit afterwards. The camera used was his own Nikon D3100. Due to a
loss of focus at time for some of our initial film, we had decided to use manual focus instead of automatic focus for
our second film opening (the one in daylight). This meant that the focus would actually have to be manually changed.
The way we had to look at the filming of this opening was to imagine where we would like to see the shot if we where
watching a film such as this and had to imagine the camera as our eyes.
Furthermore, a tripod was also used during filming and this tripod was chosen because of its smooth panning ability
and spirit level bubble in order to create level, steady shots. This particularly came in useful all the way throughout
the film but mainly when we where panning our surroundings at times. Initially taken from another group making a
similar genre opening, the camera was placed on the camera mans shoulder while filming some scenes such as the
zoom out of Dean (the snitches) face. This was very useful because it created a smooth and steady zoom back which
the audience would see as their eyes and body being dragged out.
To achieve clear, good audio we initially tried to use a home-made boom mic but decided it would be better to just
use the cameras built in mic due to problems with the dynamic mic linked with the boom mic. The cameras was
surprisingly very good and didn’t pick up much wind due to a setting on it called sound gate which acted as a high
pass filter and filtered out all the sounds below approximately 20 hertz. This is at 20 hertz because the human ear can
only pick up ranges between 20 – 20,000 hertz. The sound was also further filtered out later on Logic pro 9, Adobe
after effects CS6 and Adobe Premier pro CS6.
For the night filming solution, much research was done and the end point for this was to use a portable flood light and
film under a light source (a street lamp). These both acted as two different suns and came to be a good success. Due
to the lack of surrounding light which can picked near a city scape, the area was very closed off and there was a lack of
natural reflectors. The solution to this was to bring a couple of bottles of water with use each to spill on the ground of
where we where filming. This acted as a reflector and increased visibility of the camera. The lighting here had to be
spot on in order to pick up the actors which where mostly in dark coloured costumes. Further improvement’s with
lighting and colour was done in Adobe after effect CS6 and Adobe Premier pro CS6. In both these editing
programs, the colour of the scenes where were made much cooler just like American Gangster’s opening. And this
was done by actually decreases the warm colours such as red slightly and raising the blue a little which came to be
very successful.