Week Four - Filming

Our first day of filming was on the third of December and our set was my apartment. We had realised before our shoot day that our Joanna actress would not be available on our initial filming day which caused some mild panic amongst the crew. However, we ensured that we had pre-planned which scenes we had that did not include Joanna to take place this first day. In addition to this, we planned to save the external dream scene sections on our second filming day so that we could prioritise all of Joe's individual scenes that day. Overall, the day flowed well and quickly as our actress Fleur, although inexperienced, took to the scenes very well and had both myself and Anastajia guiding her in terms of postitioning, expressions and delivery throughout the scenes she had. We found during the day that the natural lighting in my apartment did not compliment the actress in the way we wanted it to so we had to use the Aputure 300D II Kit with added coloured gels to create the visual scene we wanted.

I personally struggled slightly with the volume of people in such a small space during the filming process because, in order to stay on time with our schedule, several people were completing several different tasks when they were not needed for the scene being filmed. For example, whilst Anastajia and I filmed in the bathroom with Marta and Veronika recording the audio, Carmen and Aiza would set up the livingroom for the next shot and Sara was working on putting together our prop camera lens glasses. This did make it difficult and frustrating at times when we would finish filming a scene yet the next one was not prepared. Therefore, in future shoots I would like to use a bigger location and have more filming crew. Below is a picture from our first day of filming.

On our second day of filming some members of the crew and our actress for Joanna were running late which resulted in us beginning filming over an hour behind schedule that day however, we were not too concerned as we already knew that we had less to film than our first shoot day two days prior. Whilst we waited for the remaining members of crew and for some of the set preperation to be complete, Anastajia and I talked through what our plan for the day was as we had not prepared as thoroughly as we did on the first day. We filmed our external scenes with just Joe in them first whilst production design helped our Joanna actress get ready and then we went straight to filming Joe and Joanna's external scene together as it was starting to get dark and rain. Then all we had left to film was the scene with the two girls in the kitchen and their scenes in the livingroom together. I personally found this second filming day more hectic as after over 20 hours of filming in total, members of the crew were becoming tired and agitated and it was much more difficult to try to keep two inexperienced actresses completely focused rather than one. In addition to this, our two actresses had never met before and all of their scenes together depict two women who know eachother well and are intimate, which we thought may be uncomfortable for them at first. In order to make them feel more comfortable acting as long time friends, I took the girls aside to an empty room and asked them to run over the lines together alone so they did not feel the pressure of everyone watching and the lights and cameras when they first did the lines together. I left the girls in there for 15 minutes, going over the lines and getting to know eachother, whilst myself and the rest of the crew prepared and set up the equipment for our scene outside the main building doors. I believe that this really helped the girls as well as helped us film the scene faster than if I had not done this because once we started filming they were already comfortable in eachother's company.

In the future to make sure things run more smoothly, we would ensure that we had back up plans for our days in case something goes wrong such as crew/cast members showing up late or cast memebers not being available to attend. In addition to this, we would ensure we keep a specific list with exact details of all of our equipment, what bags they came in when rented from the uni, and what exactly comes in their kits. This is becauseonce we had finished filming on the first day, everyone was exhausted and wished to go home which led to us rushing putting away the equipment, two days later on our second filming day we struggled to find certain parts of our equipment intially as it had been put back incorrectly which delayed us further. Below is two photos from our second day of filming.