Additional footage for the dream part

Unfortunately, during the main shooting days we didn’t have time to film two scenes for the dream sequence: many people passing by the camera and the cars speeding up, so we agreed that I could finish filming that at home in Riga. As it is a dream scene and it could be good to add some blurriness to the footage I wanted to try and film it with slow shutter speed. I went to the city centre on 30th December as it is one of the busiest days because all the people are getting ready for the New Year’s Eve, however, I could only film the cars as due to the cold weather there were almost no people on the streets. But there was also a problem with the footage of the cars as the leftovers of the snow on the ground were visible in every shot despite me trying to change the filming angles.

After sharing this with the production group we had a solution for that-Bethany told that she will be going back to London on 8th January and could try to film these shots in London. Even though it was a bit tight in terms of timing, that was our only option at that time.

Later, while re-editing the animatic of the dream part into a proper sequence I discovered that the black&white drawings made by Carmen for the storyboard looked really nice and dreamy together with the real footage. That is why I decided to film not the real footage of people passing by the camera but to ask one of my friends to wear a black hoodie and walk in different directions while I’m filming her with both: normal and slow shutter speed. Then I wanted to layer those videos and see whether it looks similar to the drawing. The same with the train on the local station.

The next day we met with my friend in our neighborhood. We chose the most neutral background we could find nearby and set up the camera. My friend walked past the camera in different directions. We filmed two options: with slow and normal shutter speed so I could experiment on post-production later. Unfortunately, layering all the videos together both for slow and normal shutter speed didn’t work even if I changed the settings, the contrast and opacity.

However, I found a way to cut the slow shutter speed clips with the minimum layering to create a similar effect and I think it worked better.

Unfortunately, Bethany didn’t manage to get the footage of cars or the train and that’s how I started going through my own archives searching for the videos of trains. Luckily, I managed to find the slow-shutter speed footage of the underground train coming to the station which we filmed with a friend of mine and never used before. That was the perfect timing!