Now into actual production. In the afternoon I discussed in my last post, I managed to finish filming everything except one scene. I still have to film voice-overs, but I did get foley done. My cameraman and I were initially going to record chronologically so we didn't miss any shots, but we ended up doing something more practical. We filmed based on location. See, even though we filmed in the same park, we wanted certain placement of trees and such for different scenes. For example, the big tree at the end of the opening couldn't be in any other scene because Lily isn't supposed to see it.
As mentioned before, I was using no sound from the original filming which means that my cameraman could talk to me and ask me questions as we were filming as well as tell me if there was anything to fix. I wouldn't exactly call them bloopers, but I'll be displaying lots of raw footage I filmed on my dad's NIKON 5000 camera to demonstrate the true trial-and-error when filming.
EX #1: Repetition
When trying to get the perfect opening shot, I knew what I was envisioning generally, but I was kind of uncomfortable with what to do as the actress. Thankfully, my cameraman was previously shown the 'vision' and we went through a process of repetition of the same scene until we found the right shot.
I still had two more options for the opening scene, but these caught more direction in the recording.
EX #2: Differences in Opinion
For this specific shot, I didn't have an exact approach in mind. After brainstorming for a minute, my cameraman and I each came up with different executions for this scene. I knew his would look too YouTube video-y but we filmed them both either way and ended up choosing the one we thought looked more professional and fitting.
We came to the conclusion that the one on the left (mine) displayed more knowledge of technique using the focus pull than the one on the right (his) which looked too amature for my portfolio project. To be fair, he's not in AICE Media Studies and I am.
This last shot isn't an example of trial-and-error, but an example of true commitment. Viewers would never know, but I wanted a shot from straight above for this one and that obviously wasn't going to happen. Instead of flying, my cameraman climbed a tree that was quite literally falling apart and almost wrecked my dad's camera to get that angle for my opening. I am very grateful, but that man did not come out unscathed. Without further ado, the shot:
To quote him, "Anything for the shot!"