Production Day #1

Today marks the first day of our official production. Pierce, Ben, Bianca, Robert, Mr. Engle and I all stayed after school from 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM. Immediately, we got to work on setting up the scene. We placed prop pill bottles on the nightstand, we removed the batteries from the clocks so time wasn't a continuity issue, and we undressed the dummies' and used their hospital gowns as Roberts costume. Today, we mainly filmed the very beginning of the title sequence. It included the events of Robert waking up, him getting out of bed after which he explores his hospital surroundings, and him discovering a dummy in a wheelchair waiting outside of his hospital room. (Creepy, right?)

Below is a picture of the dummy we used in our filming

In the beginning of production today, we knew we had wanted to produce a mysterious shadow figure behind the curtain where Lionel (Robert) stood, in order to make the audience suspicious as to what is happening and why scary shadows are behind our protagonist in the unexplored neighboring room. As a reference to what I'm talking about, here is one of the shots recorded showing Lionel walking past the shadow and questioning its presence (above)

                                          

You may be wondering how we achieved the human figure behind the curtain. Well, rather than forcing a member of our crew to sit there motionless while I filmed their shadow, we found it better to use our resources, and prop up a dummy on the other side. Here's a picture of what the dummy looked like from the other side. We had to scout out numerous pillows from around the mock hospital to use as support for holding up the dummy in the position we wanted (which proved slightly difficult, as the dummy was rather heavy and hard to move!)

In order to achieve the shadow itself, we had Bianca (production designer) hold up industrial lights that Pierce (director) owned, while Pierce and I would record and examine shots on the opposite side of the curtain and decide where the light should be held, how close she should stand to the curtain, and make configurations to the position of the dummy until the shadow was camera ready.