Shoot Day

The shoot day was really busy and tiring but we came out with a good productive day and hopefully a good thriller.

In the morning we were concentrate on finishing the setting so hanging the rest of the keys and sorting the padlock. As we didn’t want to show the door’s lock we decided to cover it with the actual padlock, placing in it right on top of it using some chains attached to the extreme ends of the set.

We then thought about Charlie the main actor, make up and costumes, we had Sasha our make up artist to do to bruises all over his face and on his hands. The costume was a plain suite that the actor brought from home. The final result was pleasing as it looked realistic and it took just under an hour to sort those details.

Luke, the main media filming teacher that was present with us the day came out with the idea of using the shadows of bars to make the set looking even more as a cell, but we decided not to use it as we thought it didn’t look as professional just because we needed to modify the light intensity making the room too bright.

We started with a wide shot and running the whole performance, reaping the whole process a couple of times.

Then we started to get closer and concentrate on the main parts of the film, to show details.

The next step was shooting the key shot, were Charlie finds the right key. We played around with focused and unfocused effects as well as close ups.

Every time Charlie took a key down we had to put it back up in the exact same position, to show continuity so we decided to choose a certain number of keys and marked them on the ceiling so we knew where to look later on and we made easier for the actor to pick the same one all over again, without having him confused and distracted by the other keys. This was probably the most difficult and long bit of the whole filming process of the day as the same shoot had to be repeated several time to get it perfectly done.

The actor had to leave for an hour to attend his drama lesson, but as group we worked out that timing filming the introduction of the movie, using all the props around the set. During that time we also had Luke teaching us few techniques about using the camera, and all sort of shots. We practised them and we discuss about it later on. The most difficult shot we learn was the slow motion one as the camera timed 3 second to focus, zoomed out and focus again, this requested a good use of hand work as well as technique on using the camera, however the pan shot of the keys on the ceiling wasn’t easy either.

Another interesting fact we learned was the uses of different lenses, as we were beginner we used a zoom lens but it was best to use a macro lens for the close up have a more detailed shot.

After lunchtime we decided to use that timing to finish everything of as we saw that the all crew was really tired. We shot the final scenes, and few detailed close ups.

By three o’clock we finished filming and started to clear the set.

As a group I believe we worked really well and involved our self in all the different roles of filming, cameraman, soundman and director. We learnt lots of different thing and we are ready to learn more specially in the editing subject.

During the shoot day I realised how much work and effort is actually filming a little scene and much work is involved around it, so I can only imagine the work, effort and money behind a movie.

The positive things of our shoot day was that we worked as a team and swapped roles, so we could experiment, feel and discuss the happening.

The actor, Charlie was really good and collaborated with us to come up with the best result, he listened to our requirements and he perform it as we were expecting or even better.

The main problems we found are the positioning of all the keys in the same place, taking lots of time. The padlock kept opening, as it was an old one, ruining some good shots, so we had to repeat them to show continuity, wasting precious for later on. There were so many shots that we could have done but we were conscious of the time limited for the opening scene (2 minutes) so instead of keep shooting risking to exclude some important one, we decided to stop once we though we had enough material to work on.