Jess Barnett

Day 1 of filming started bright and early on the 15th of January 2017, the weather was just right for filming; dry and slightly overcast, this would make it a lot easier for us to make sure there were no continuity errors with lighting. 

We had already made our storyboard and shotlist so in out heads we already had a plan of how the day would run.

Once we had all arrived at jacks house; which is where most of our filming would take place, we got straight down to work. The first few shots ran smoothly and we were ticking our way down our shotlist, however, we had some difficulties with lighting when we moved to do a high angle shot, we noticed that the camera was focusing on the light coming from the window behind Jack, making him appear as a silhouette against the window, to overcome this, we put some lights behind the camera and this solved the problem, bringing Jack back into focus.

We found some shots easy to film and swiftly got through them, however, others we had to film a couple of times for reasons such as the shot being out of focus, white balance being off, or we simply didn't like the framing of the shot so tried something else.

Once we had done all our indoor shots, we stopped for a quick snack, as we had been filming for a few hours by this point and we wanted to keep our energy up. Then we wrapped up warm and prepared to face the chilly winter weather. Luckily, the subway we planned to use was only a 5 minute walk away, so we did not have to walk in the cold too long before we could continue filming.

We found filming outside was harder than filming inside due to added complications such as background noise and pedestrians. However, after a few more hours, we eventually had all the shots we needed. One shot we found particularly difficult, was a shot which required all three of us to be in frame (as our actors were not available for the first day of filming, Skye and I stood in for the sake of our rough cut) however, we struggled to work the camera, getting the right framing whilst having all of us in the shot.

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Our motto throughout the day was that it was better for us to have too many shots than too little, as having too many shots meant that we had something to work with. So by the end of the day, we had plenty shots from different angles and perspectives that could then go on to be edited together to produce our rough cut. After 5 long hours of filming, it was time for us to call it a day and head home.

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Day 2 of filming commenced in the 5th of February 2017. We all met again at Jacks house, ready and rearing to get straight down to filming. We had our list of things to add, remove and improve on based off the feedback we received from our rough cut. 

We started by filming some establishing shots that set the scene and would also work effectively for us to lay titles over.

Next, we filmed some shots of Jack hiding the vodka bottles that were in the background of a previous scene because some feedback we received was that the father character would not be happy with vodka in the room so it would make sense to hide them.

We had all our actors for this day of filming, so we re-filmed the shots that we required them to be in, which included walking down to the back of Poole Grammar School to film a scene of some friends walking out of school at the end of the day.

One thing we struggles with on day 2 of filming was making sure that everything in the room was in the same place/the same props were in the shot so there was no continuity errors, so we had to spend a bit of time looking carefully at each shot and making sure that we were recreating it perfectly.

Overall, we spent around another 4 hours filming on our second day, but by the end we were confident we had all the shots we required and that we could combine it with shots from our first day of filming to create our final short film opening.