14th Jan, first filming session – disaster

As me, Sehb and Amber all had a day full of free periods, we scheduled to meet up for our first shooting session. As the actors needed where free as well, we decided to take advantage and try shoot as much as possible, all at once.
However I think this is where we seriously went wrong.

We began with a scene in the food hall at our school, ‘the cafe’ – it was a perfect location at the time, not many people where in there, making it quiet but ambient sound still present.
We positioned the camera the other side of the room to the actors, at a point of view level. We wanted to create a sense of isolation for the character as no one appeared to be near him. In addition to this, he was far enough to be unnoticed by the couple.
We had chosen performing arts students as our actors to make the direction easier and to make the footage look more professional. However this didn’t go to plan as we were hoping. As we began to film them it was clear that they felt completely uncomfortable and weren’t able to get in character at all. After many takes we ended up with useable footage but it was nowhere near the standard I was hoping for. This kept occurring as the day went on, which I started to get frustrated about.
However we carried on. After school we went to our next location – the protagonist’s house.
Whilst in a negative attitude from the footage we got at school, we decided to test the bath scenes before shooting the real deal. I volunteered to get in the bath to act the person drowning whilst amber filmed. Although we attempted a variety of shots, we discovered it would be more difficult than we expected. What we filmed wouldn’t be suitable for the final piece at all. we decided to leave the bath scenes for a later date so we could concentrate on the rest of the footage.
The next scene we filmed would be the first 15 seconds of the sequence when the main character and the scrap book are introduced, meaning they had to filmed to our best ability. We had to assure we centralised the book at all times and the lighting was correct. We also didn’t want a clear shot of the protagonists face to create mystery. The footage began to look better, the shots where still and we used a variety of shots. However, it was difficult to do, we had issues of being able to get home and a member of the group became ill, distracting us from concentrating. We did manage to get the shots we needed though and we were later able to sort out our personal problems.