First Day of Filming!

unpacking

We started filming today! We decided to meet up at my house to film because we needed a garage that was extremely messy. While I'm not proud to say it, my garage fit the role perfectly. I had just moved to my house recently so it honestly was a mess, but for once, that was a good thing so that is where we decided to film the first scene of our opening.

Tight Space!

As soon as everyone arrived we looked over the storyboard and unpacked the cameras to get ready to film. It honestly was hard to move around in my garage because I live in a townhouse, therefore; the garage was very small. Not only was it small but as previously stated it was very cluttered so moving around proved to be a small issue. In addition to the size and the clutter, the tripod was not exactly helping our case but we made do.

Our attempt to dim light 

We then decided to look at the lighting we were dealing with. Since our film falls under the Thriller genre we wanted to make sure the lighting was low key and that it created an unnerving and ominous mood. In order to achieve this, we decided to use lamps instead of the main light of the garage. At first, we connected a lamp in the garage and it was far too bright so we decided to try and dim it by covering it with opaque plastic bags. While this did work, it was essentially useless because it came to one of my group member's attention that they had a professional light with filters.


It was quite funny to see Eugenia play around with light in different places to make sure everything showed up on camera, but in the end, it was for a good cause.

Eugenia lighting up the set 

We also forgot to consider that someone needed to throw Gabe in the garage for the opening scene, so I volunteered as tribute. However, my efforts were all in vain due to the fact that I am not even five foot and Gabe is extremely tall. So even though I was dressed in all black and you could not see my face it was not working out. Thankfully though, my brother arrived in time to steal the spotlight from me and replace me in my villainous role. Just Kidding! I'm not mad, in fact, he did a great job throwing Gabe in the garage it was quite a performance.

Throughout filming, we were also faced with some safety issues that we did not expect to encounter. For example, when Gabe was falling off the chair we did not want him to lay on the concrete so we incorporated a bag filled with bags to cushion his fall. We then filmed shots with him already on the ground and we plan to use editing to our advantage to put the scene together. In addition to this, we did not want him to get harmed by the chair when he dove to the ground so I masterfully guided the chair's movement so that it seemed realistic but did not hurt Gabe.

Overall we got a great deal of footage to work with. We made sure to overshoot in case we needed it and we got all the filming in that location done. :)