Tuesday, 20 February 2018

Monday 19th Feb | Shoot Day #1

Laura's schedule:



What happened on the day:

On this day we were shooting scene 9 & 10, with the characters Annie, Dean & Betty.

  • We stuck to the schedule in the morning arriving in the location at the right time. We got the cameras set up and the set dressed for scene 9, along with preparing the props and making sure they were ready to use. 
    • As director, I handed out the shoot packs and made sure everyone knew what we were doing today in terms of shooting.
  • We had originally planned not to use lights in the kitchen as we couldn't book any out due to them already being in use over their allotted time, and we thought the natural light coming in from the windows would be enough.
    • Once Nisserin and Drey had the cameras up, they looked and found that it was too dark and they needed some lights. So they drove over to the studios and collected the tungsten lights which were the only choice we had. 
  • The actors arrived, had refreshments and got into their costumes and style for the scenes. Not long after, Nisserin and Drey arrived and started setting up the lights.
    • As they did this, I took all three actors into the location of the scene and blocked scene 9 with them. The actors asked if they could do a few run-throughs of the scene now that they knew what they were doing, so we did a few as cameras and lights were getting into the right positions.
  • Once cast and crew were all ready we started to go for a take. Due to the space of the room, we knew we would have to do this scene as a single cam, so we started on the wide. We did a few takes on this shot before the zoom started to stop working.
    • A problem occurred with the zoom and the sd cards, and as we all tried to find a solution to this we couldn't fix it. So we resulted to connecting the zoom to the camera and filming the sound from one of the other panasonics.
  • We did a few shots on the wide with the working sound and once I was happy and everyone else was too we moved onto a camera reset. There were a few expected mess ups during the takes on the wide such as line mess ups and interruptions but all were recovered. The actors also gave some suggestions on new bits of action that might be funny, and I thought this was really good to have.
  • We then got a two shot of Dean and Betty and did a few takes of this. We made sure to start this shoot after Betty appears in the selfie as we didn't need it beforehand. Once we were all happy with this we found that we were quite a bit ahead of the schedule so I made the decision to get single shots of all of the characters. This was a good decision as it means we will have more to work with when it comes to the edit. However, I wanted to make sure we had all of the GV's we needed so we did that first.
    • The two GV's we got were the Betty spoon and the iPad selfie. With the spoon, we tried it with the characters in shot and without to see which we preferred in editing. With the selfie, I decided I liked the shot looking as if it was the iPad so we had Christine put her hands out to the camera like she was holding it.
  • The singles of each character worked well, especially Betty's as it meant Jemma (the sound operator) could get as close to Betty as possible, to make her audio louder. This will help us a lot when it comes to editing the sound. Once I felt we had enough footage we wrapped Scene 9 on time. We then stopped for lunch.
    • During lunch Nisserin imported the footage and sound, and we had a look and listen back to it. Due to the sound being from the camera, there was a hiss in the background but there wasn't much we could do, so we can fix it in editing. Drey spent some of lunch testing the tascam and worked out how to use it for the next scene which was. amassed help.
  • AFTER LUNCH
  • We started to set up cameras and dress the set for scene 10. In comparison to the single cam technique we had to do for scene 9, we used all three cameras using the multi-cam set up for scene 10 (a wide, MCU of Betty & MCU of Dean). As the cameras and lights, which were taking a while due to them being more problematic than the LEDs, were being set up I ran through the blocking of the scene with Greg and Susan.
    • In previous discussions, myself and Nisserin had decided it would be funny if Arnold got thrown into shot, which we tried with Susan. However, it wasn't really working as I had hoped it would so instead I decided Betty would take Arnold out from her bag. Susan had the idea, to keep the humour in the scene, that she could thrust Arnold upon Dean in a humorous way. I liked this idea and thought it worked really well.
  • Once I was happy with the way each shot looked for that part of the scene, we did a camera reset. Originally myself and Nisserin had planned to have two cameras in the doorway (one outside and one inside), and then the third camera would be in the dining room on a MS of Dean in the shoe cupboard. However, due to the lack of space we found we could only fit one camera in the doorway at a time. This meant we needed to do those shots separately and it made sense to start outside due to not getting in the way of the camera in the dining room.
  • When the cameras were in place and the lights were in the best positions we started shooting the rest of the scene. This part of the scene didn't take too long to shoot as it was quite straight forward, so once I was happy with the shots, we brought the camera inside to do the opposing doorway shot. We started this shot as Betty was being pushed out of the door (past the camera) and we did it a few times to get enough to work with.
  • Once I was happy with the coverage of that scene, we started to shoot some GV's. 
    • The only GV we needed was a shot of Dean throwing Arnold and the spoon into the Betty box in the shoe cupboard. We tried two different shots - one was looser and one was tighter - and when it comes to editing we can decide which one we prefer. 
  • After myself and Nisserin were happy with the footage we had got and the amount we had shot, we wrapped for the day.

Notes:

For the first shoot day of the week it went really well, apart from a few hiccups in the morning with the lights. The actors listened to what I had to say, and I listened to them which I think helped our working relationship. The communication between myself and the DOP was strong and we were always conversing about the shots. Jemma did really well on sound and I was happy with the outcome of that. Drey and George helped massively with the cameras and the lights, and that helped the day run smoothly.
Overall, it was a good shoot day with very little stress and problems.


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