Shooting on Location Day 6

Date: Wednesday 14th January
Location: 57 Ramillies Crescent
Time of Day: Night
Time filming started: 4:00 Pm
Time filming finished: 8:00 Pm

Scene: 2 Shots: 51-58 Interior

Summary

So today we were filming the shots that took place upstairs when Alice ran up them to escape Richard and went into the bathroom. We started off in the bathroom where Deanna Dribbled water over Rebecca's face and eyes to simulate the look of her crying as she couldn't do it on command, this worked realistically and so to our advantage. A interesting shot we did was a shot of her in the mirror wiping her tears away and panning the camera to the door with her looking at it when it was knocked and then following it back to the mirror. It was pulled off as a very smooth shot and surprisingly we managed to stay out of the background in the mirror! A lot of work had to be done to get this shot nice though as the lighting wasn't the best in the bathroom so Dan had an LED light aimed so it would reflect off the strategically placed reflectors and on to Rebecca to get a nicely illuminated shot. 

After this shot was perfected we moved on to the hallway to film Alex (Richard's) ascent of the stairs to find Alice and his knock on the bathroom door, we also filmed Alice's running up the stairs shot when the is on her way to the bathroom, Dan recorded this as the tripod was too big to sit on the stairs and the idea of having a hand held recording of it was to make the shot seem more distressed and get the viewer into the chaos of her running away up the stairs. This did however take a few takes to get right as positioning was wrong we either had too much dead space or she went out of shot and out of rule of thirds too much which we needed to keep her in because for the symbolism of the shakey shot and her running to be connotated emotionally to the audience as a distressing time.

We were going to start on our filming of the "falling downstairs" shot but felt it be best to save that till tomorrow when we had more time as we would need to experiment with how this would work and look best. So next entry will most likely entail the review of that day and how we did it :)

This is a video of our practice and debate for the falling down the stairs shot, the idea of tracking Rebecca in our previous filming, practice shot of a way to film Alex walking up the stairs and generally a behind the scenes of how most of our filming days went, a lot of practice shots and debate: 

Shooting on Location Day 5

Date: Saturday 10th January
Location: 57 Ramillies Crescent
Time of Day: All Day (Day and Night)

Time filming started: 12:00pm
Time filming finished: 9:30pm

Scene: 2 & 3 Shots: 62-72 Interior, Exterior 43-50, Interior shot 5

Summary

Today started relatively early as we needed as much day light as possible to film Millie's (Stacey's) shots as she only had until 5 oclock before she had to leave us, this worked out fine for us as Stacey's shots we're all daylight shots anyway.

For the first half of the day Deanna and I left the boys to get on with the work, referring them to the storyboard for shot composition and explaining how it should look while we got on with changing the script. The reason Deanna and I were changing the end of the script was not only to give Stacey a bigger role but because a whole new ending had been thought up to our film and we really wanted to do that ending instead, so excitedly Deanna and I bounced up stairs to frantically write our ideas down while the boys Cam and Dan started filming shot 62 (a close up of Alex on the stairs playing with Alice's necklacke) and exterior shots of Stacey approaching the house and entering.

When we got to shot 69 Deanna and I had finished writing the script ending and we were back down stairs assisting with the filming. Shot 69 was a lot of shot reverse shots due to the characters having a conversation. We did this by setting up the camera behind Alex to start with and filmed Millie coming in through the door and then running through the complete conversation so that in editing we could cut it accurately. After that, we shifted the camera behind Millie and filmed Alex saying his parts and then walking off into the kitchen (shot 72).

We eventually got all of the day light scenes done and moved on to the night scenes of Alice and Richard,  While Alex went to get changed into his costume for scene 2 Deanna did Rebecca's make up and we got the set clear and ready. We were doing the kitchen scene today where Richard smashes the photograph of him and Alice and the argument ends when she runs upstairs our plan was to finish this scene today and we achieved our plan, yay!

Of course it was a major safety issue to have Alex smash the glass, not just for his safety but for ours and Dan's dog's that was liable to step on a stray tiny shard of glass, so we took it outside and smashed it at the bottom of Dan's drive when it was wrapped in kitchen roll, Dan recorded the sound to use in the film and we faked Alex smashing the picture frame by having a non broken version for him to fake smash and changing to a reaction shot of Alice just before the picture connects with the corner of a washer, this will work effectively with the right editing i'm sure Dan and Cam will do an excellent job on it in the editing stage.

Shooting on location Day 4

Date: Friday 9th January
Location: 57 Ramillies Crescent

Time filming started: 4:00pm
Time filming finished: 9:30pm

Scene: 2 Shots:  31-42 

Equipment: 
DSLR Camera + Tripod
Tracking Dolly
Sound Recording Kit
Large & Small Reflectors
LED Light

Summary of today

Today was an exciting day for us, after setting up the table to its minutest detail we were ready to break the news to the actors that today was "slap day". There was a bit of nervous tension about how we were going to make a slap look realistic and not hurt our actors in the process, so Deanna and I got to work on discussing where best to fit in our actresses slap in the argument, after some talking we decided the script needed to be rewrote and we frantically started crossing out lines and stage directions, while we were redoing the script Cameron and Dan got to work on doing some singular hallway shots so time was not being wasted.

When we finally finished the script, a discussion about how the shot should go commenced and cameron made a good point that it should just be one fluid shot instead of deanna's suggest point of view shot, this way it doesn't detract from the action and you dont loose the momentum and drama of the scene. In agreement this is what we went with and was a very effective set up.

Our second fiddly shot was Richard's (Alex) 'angry reaction'. Originally we were going to have a two shot of Alex knock a chair over in anger, but after not being able to get it right in a few takes we had to stop and change that idea as the chair kept knocking the glass table and we were pushing our luck with it's durability. Instead we changed it to Richard picking up Alice's (Rebecca) book 'Romeo and juliet' and throwing it at/past her against the door for an effective dramatic sound and look, after a couple shots we got this right finally! Daniel's dad wasn't pleased with the row we were making because "what would the neighbors think" about all the banging and shouting our actors were doing, so thank god we got that right and didn't have to reshoot it! poor Dianna was also wedged behind the door to stop it from swinging back and then forth with the impact so she was pretty thankful it didn't take too, I filmed this 2 shot and let Cam have a rest standing as it has been a long day of filming. 

Out takes of Alex's 'Angry reaction' A.K.A Shot 38:

Shooting on location Day 3

Date: Thursday 8th January
Location: 57 Ramillies Crescent


Time filming started: 4:00pm
Time filming finished: 9:30pm

Scene: 2 Shots: 25-30 

All Cast and Crew Present.

Today's filming went well, our plan for today was to get all the hallway shots done and progress to the living room so there was more space for new camera angles and better lighting as Daniel's hallway is very dark and enclosed making movement hard. 

we started filming our dialogue shots today so the actors had to rehearse their lines, this took a lot more time than we expected it to take but we made use of the time they were rehearsing to conference about how we as a team shall go about shooting this scene, how long we wanted it to take and how we were going to fit in a Dinner break as some crew members were complaining about hunger pains (we're growing teens after all).

Alex did very good reaction shots to Rebecca's anger which was exactly what we needed, it only took a few takes to get it right thankfully, I filmed towards the end of today as my lack of height was advantageous for a perfect panning 2 shot of Rebecca and Alex.

Today went well today over all, hopefully we stay on this course of good fortune and manage to get all filming done in a few shots. 

Shooting on location Day 2

Date: Wednesday 7th January 
Location: 57 Ramillies Crescent

Time of Day: Night
Time filming started: 4:00pm
Time filming finished: 9:30pm

Crew Present: Deanna Hopps, Cameron Hargreaves, Daniel Springthorpe, Charlotte Smith (Me)
Cast Present: Rebecca Chapman - Alice, Alex Marks - Richard


Scene: 2 Shots: 16-24 - Interior
Equipment: 
DSLR Camera + Tripod
Tracking Dolly
Sound Recording Kit
Large & Small Reflectors
LED Light

Deanna arranging the set

Transportation for today
Our own two feet were our mode of transport today! The equipment was of course drove to Daniel's house as stated from the last shooting day it is simply just too much to carry and too awkward! 

Before I progress, if you haven't noticed in the cast listing there's a change in male actors. We decided with reluctance to change actors, this is because of a lot of reasons but the main one being that they are too young to be staying with us everyday after school until after 9 on the evening so in consideration we changed the main male character. 

Okay so with that being said we started our second but realistically first shooting day with the new actor on set. While Deanna did Rebecca's make-up Alex changed into his costume and Cameron and Daniel set up the set and camera, while I cleaned the location of anything that would be moved in Dan's house from day to day so as not to create any continuity errors while filming. 

After helping Alex through what we wanted him to do for our shots we were ready to go, because we were redoing shots 16-24 Rebecca already knew what she was doing so it was easy to redo her shots our main problem was still the lighting though which LED's couldnt fix without distorting the colour of the set, after a little playing around with the exposure we managed to sort our lighting problem at least, it took a bit more time to get Alex into the swing of things and remembering his lines but Dan helped him through this first day and we eventually got there in the end. On a bad note though, Alex is also a full time student meaning filming will have to be done after 4 everyday until late and we can see ourselves having to book in some weekend time with the equipment to do some weekend filming later on.