Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Production Day #2

After spending around 3 hours after school yesterday with the rest of my cast/crew ( plus Mr. Engle), we did not finish production. So, we requested just one more day, and thankfully Mr. Engle agreed to stay after with us once again! So today was our second and final day of the production stage. Today, we recorded the rest of the title sequence, which includes Lionel (Robert) traveling into the other hospital rooms, him interacting with the mysterious figure following him, and we also ended up re-shooting some clips from the dummy encounter on day 1 to make it feel less cheesy.


One huge thing we experiment with today was the creation of the human shadow behind the curtain that creeps up behind Lionel and ends up attacking him. The first step was experimenting with the lighting. We had Ben, our editor, hold the industrial lights close behind the curtain, that way the light was strong enough to form a shadow if someone was standing between the curtain and light source. Pierce, our director, stood on the opposite side of the curtain and informed us how the shadow was looking and suggested changes to Ben as to how high he should hold the light, its distance from the curtain, etc. As the only other female on set at the time, I was once again acting in the film as the mysterious female figure, though this time you couldn't see my face. Instead, it was my shadow we used. I stood in between the curtain and the light, while we recorded a few test shots to see how our idea looked on camera. Below are a few of our experimentations:


Seen above is me wrapping my arms around Robert quickly, catching his character off guard and evoking fear 


As a second idea, we also filmed some experimental shots of Roberts character being attacked slowly (seen above) though it was decided after that a faster attack is much more visually appealing

All in all, our production phase was very successful. Though we did have a minor setback earlier due to the fact that we reshot everything, our final product after today will definitely be spooky. And, it should be noted that our first attempt at filming at the Super 8 motel for our original rough cut was not a big waste of time! A HUGE thing we learned was that filming on one camera is simply foolish! At Super 8, we were only filming on one camera - even if it was possible to be shooting on 2 or 3 cameras at once - which prevented us from getting multiple angles of the same shot while simultaneously saving time. Pierce and I discussed this afterwards, noting that we both had access to Cannon cameras, I had an iPhone X, and Pierce, Robert and Ben all owned iPhones with good cameras as well. Considering there are 4 of us in the crew, there was no reason why we shouldn't have be filming on more than one camera! We reflected on mistakes such as this, and made sure to use it as a learning experience that way our second round of production was much smoother and efficient. When filming at school, we shot on at least 2 cameras every chance we got.

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