The Filming/ Production of my Fiction Adaptation Piece

Today was the filming/ production of my fiction adaptation piece. As stated in an earlier post, I did eventually have to use one of the crew members to stand in as a second actor as I was not able to acquire another in the short time I'd had before the shoot.

Shoot Location 1:
The graveyard scene took slightly longer than I had anticipated. This was mostly due to the crew being later than expected. However, the subsequent filming that took place was swift. I'd already scoped out the cemetery with my actor while we were waiting for the others and had found a suitable grave and pathway to film one of the characters walking down and kneeling at the grave.

I'd decided to keep my original idea of the character walking up to a grave in order to symbolise metaphorical loss. I realise that this might closer resemble death but I felt that as long I balance this correctly with the other footage that mirrors this scene and concludes with a redemption, then the symbolism would not be so heavy-handed.

The grave we found and chose to film was clear with no name on its surface. This was perfect as the reverend of the church where the cemetery was located asked to not show any names out of respect.

There was some trouble with some members of the public walking through but we, of course, respected that they are there on their own personal business so we let them carry on undisturbed and halted filming temporarily.

The crew member himself didn't have much of a task when it came to acting as he simply had to walk towards the camera and stop and turn to face the grave, then kneel down. Overall shooting time was very quick, taking only ten minutes. I didn't want to rush this shoot seeing as I wanted to get the best footage I could for the time constraints of the actors. I did have some trouble with the focus at one point as I found it hard to see the screen properly on the Sony EX Camera I was using; I didn't feel like it gave a clear view of when the camera was in focus or not. Thankfully, one of my crew members were on hand, who obviously had keener eyes than I, who helped me with this.


Shoot Location 2:
We then headed to the nearby park. All of my locations were near to each other, meaning that we could move from one location to another and set up in very little time.

Thankfully, the filming took place at a time where all children were at school so we didn't need to worry about avoiding them. There were some general members of the public who passed through but they were no trouble; we just delayed until they were clear.

This scene involved the two characters walking through the park and one of the characters having a mental break-down as he has illusions of his friend laughing at him.

The shots for this scene were not very ordinary but had been previously planned. I still stuck to most of my original storyboard with a few minor changes to accommodate with certain changes made after my initial report feedback. Many of the shots consisted of several crash-zooms onto the protagonist's face to represent a more distorted and crazed reality that would be taking place in their mind during the scene. I tilted the camera to its side slightly to show how their world is metaphorically turning upside down.

This scene did require a lot of retakes and there are enough pieces of footage to create a small 'blooper-reel' as a side project. Most retakes were caused by either members of the public being in shot, my forgetting to push the record button at one point and times where my actor got worried that I was going to hit them in the face whenever I did a crash zoom despite my reassurances that this would not happen. A specific shot that required a lot of retakes was a low-angle shot of the protagonist falling onto the floor. The character wears a hat throughout the scene and it unfortunately kept comically falling off whenever the actor hit the floor. To resolve this, we decided that the hat should be pulled over the actor's face entirely in the hoped that it would just reach the top of his head and not fall away. This did work and I got the shot that I wanted.

Another problem that I had encountered was the lighting. The weather was mostly cloudy but the sun had broken through during this shooting segment, meaning a change in lighting. To keep continuity, I decided to reshoot several earlier shots.


Shoot Location 3:
A small pathway across a filed saved as the third location and this was also a fast shoot. Many of the shots consisted of the protagonist running down the path. These shots were done by having the actor run and with me running both behind and later in front (with support, and making sure to wear appropriate) while filming with the camera. The results worked well. Other shots included the character grabbing his head and yelling to himself. These shots were also successful and were done in quick succession.

The actor really put a lot of effort into his performance and wasn't afraid to be as loud and crazed as possible, saying to me 'I can do this all day, don't worry' when I wanted to do another take.


Shoot Location 4:
The last shooting location was at my house. I'd dressed the set up to make to area around our characters seem as barren as possible and used a lamp to try and create some atmospheric lighting. In hind-sight, I feel that the light did make the scene look a bit too orange but I should be able to fix this in post.

The protagonist was sat in a chair while his friend is trying to talk to him. This scene features a lot more of the friend who is seen to be mourning his loss, looking out of the window and calling a doctor to see if they can help but to no avail. However, due to it being later in the day, the amount of light did noticeably drop during the shooting of this segment/ scenes. I should be able to rectify this during post, however.


Overall, I am quite happy with how the process of filming these scenes went. I made sure to get straight down to business and filmed what I needed to film and move on to the next part, something which had otherwise bothered me when working in a group for the last project. This wasn't at the expense of setting up each shot properly however, as I took the time to make sure everything was as good as it could be and didn't needlessly reshoot parts that I deemed perfect to begin with. The result was a swift shooting schedule which paid off as I could get to editing sooner.