LAFTAS: Filming

We were all really excited to film, and we felt we had enough planning, equipment and support that was necessary to film some of our shots, for example, we had my dad available to drive the car into the driveway. We started the day at 11am as we planned, and spent half an hour checking through our storyboards and making sure we had the right equipment and props for each shot.

We filmed in chronological order and ticked off on our storyboards to make sure we didn’t miss anything. We had in mind that if we missed out a shot, our scene would have continuity errors, as the body needed to be shown at each stage of getting out the car, so we were careful not to miss anything out.

Although I had practiced using the steadicam, I found it very difficult to use it when we started filming, mainly because quite a lot of our shots were from a low angle. Therefore, we decided to film as much as we could using the mini dolly, tripod and handheld to ensure that we had enough choice when it came to editing. As well as this we filmed a lot of extra shots that we hadn’t planned for on our storyboards, because we didn’t want to have to re-shoot anything due to our limited time frame. We also filmed each shot at least twice and looked through them to make sure they were in focus and had no little wobbles or errors.

The interior shots, we had to film on the following day due to time, location and the number of actors we had available to us. This wasn’t too much of an issue as we were able to begin editing on the Monday and have the rest of the shots ready to add in on Tuesday.

Overall, I feel that our filming went quite well, despite a few changes to the weather which meant we had to wait for the sun to go away in order to maintain consistency with the lighting throughout the film. Also, as we were planning to add filters to make it look as if we filmed at dusk, we didn’t want some shots to clearly have bright sunlight.

Here are some photos we took on the day: