March 2, 2009

"Filming day" Sunday and Saturday

On the day we filmed, it was at night and we took five hours to shoot the scenes we could get that night. During the shooting, as I was not tall enough to do some shots, Henry helped by holding the camera while I direct (I felt very short standing next to him). We worked great as a team and I did my roll as the cameraperson at the same time.

The photos above are evidence of the night when we were shooting. Even though we were tired, we still cooperated as a team and tried our best to understand each others' roles. At first, I used the dolly, however, after the first shot, we decided to hold the camera as the dolly was too shaky on the uneven concrete, therefore the films are not smooth. Each scene was challenging as there were problems with the lighting and the fluidity from scene to scene. Therefore, we followed some parts of the storyboard, while we improvised for other scenes when needed to.

On Saturday, we filmed the flashbacks of the film in the afternoon at Medora and my place. We closed the curtains and used lights to help show the features of the faces of the characters.

As shown in the photos above, Medora helped me with my make-up. And then the second photos shows that I am sitting in a position for a close-up for the flashbacks. I acted as "Jennifer" and the shots were successful. We finished filming in 3 hours. We thought about the "final product" as we were shooting which helped us consider better angles and lightings. It was successful and we were ready to edit on monday.

As we have managed to film on friday and saturday, we uploaded our footage to Final Cut Pro. At first, we had some encounters with uploading it as the settings of the external hard drive do not match the settings of the computer. However, once the settings were set to the correct one, we waited for Final Cut Pro to capture the whole footage.

While waiting, we decided to do the voiceovers in one of the practice rooms to use our time wisely. We recorded Andy's voiceovers and it was a success. When we went back to the Multimedia Lab, our footage was done capturing. Therefore, we started looking at the films and deleting the bad scenes. While Medora worked on the sounds of the voiceovers and Greensleeves. I provided suggestions to Andy and we discussed the possibilities for the scenes. We accomplished a lot this double and we were good communicators, thinkers, open-minded, principled and risk-takers.