Post Eighteen: Production Report

Due to several issues revolving around technical issues and issues of reliability within the car my group had to take a second attempt at filming our short film 'Bruises' - within this production report I will talk about both our first and final attempt of filming.

FIRST ATTEMPT FILMING:

The production of our short film 'Bruises' began on Thursday 10/03/11 - Before this date we had arranged within our shooting schedule and within the call sheets created by myself as the director to film in a chronological order, this meaning that on Thursday 10/03/11 we had established that we would be filming the entire of Scene one and carrying on filming in the sequence of the script. This first day of filming was a success, we managed to film everything we had planned to as well as being happy with the quality of what we had produced. The next day we were due to film on was the following day, Friday 11/03/11 - this was the date on which our problems began within our first attempt of filming. On this day of filming and once we had set up within the filming location it was approximately 4:15pm, our actors then proceeded to explain to us that they were only available until 6:00pm after we had previously arranged to film until 9/10:00pm, this led to us only managing to film half a scene out of the three we had planned for this day of shooting.

 Due to this and our realisation of the time restraint we were under we made the decision to schedule another day of filming in order to get back on track by catch up on the filming we had missed out on Friday 11/03/11. The day we selected and agreed with the cast was Thursday 17/03/11, however once again on the day of filming our actors yet again let us down and told us that they could not stay until the desired time - at this point as a team, me and Rachael realised that the reliability issues our actors were presenting us with were becoming problematic not only in terms of time but also in terms of the level of continuity we were keeping to within our film. We gave the actors another chance as the idea of a re-shoot was not plausible at the time, so we scheduled with the cast two more days on which we would film: Wednesday 23/03/11 and Thursday 24/03/11, our actors failed to turn up to the filming location of Wednesday 23/03/11, they showed us the following day however the rooms we needed to film is were occupied. Although we had checked the rotas for the rooms we realised we should have made a point of booking them as to prevent problems such as this arising.

After many failed attempts at filming, our realisations of the deadline approaching and the lack of dedication exhibited from our actors we decided our only option was to chance a re-shoot - we swapped one of our actors, 'Grace' remained the same however we swapped the role of 'Grace's' father: this worked to our advantage in more than one way, the freshly selected actor was dedicated to the filming as well as fitting into the role better than the previous actor, filling more of the forms and conventions of 'Grace's' father. We also arranged in advance two days within the Easter holiday in which we would film - using the holidays allowed us whole days to film rather than just evenings as well as making the setting more realistic due to the fact that we had more of a range of natural lighting as well as artificial - We also arranged after the Easter holidays to finish the remainder of the filming.

FINAL ATTEMPT FILMING:
On our first selected day of filming of our final attempt within the Easter holidays, Thursday 21/04/11 we arranged for the crew to arrive at the filming destination, my house at 9:00am - this was communicated through the use of call sheets as well as conversation, the crew arrived earlier than the cast to enable to crew to set up smoothly. The process of setting up in this location was relatively difficult and was done in several steps:
1) the first step was to personalise a bedroom to 'Grace' rather than to myself, we did this through getting rid of most of the blank space as well as adding certain books to my desk and writing statements on my notice board e.g. art home work - this was relevant to 'Grace' as her art lessons are part of the film sequence.


LIGHTING - BLUE GELS



2) The lighting set up within my house was relatively difficult – this was down to the fact that we had chosen to use blue gels within the scenes in my house to create the desired atmosphere and mood, this involved covering all of the lights used within the scene and used out of scene to add to lighting of the shots in blue gels.  Within the majority of the rooms there were singular lights to cover – this involved using bull dog clips to attach the blue gels to light shades. However, it was the spotlighting in my kitchen that presented a problem – in order to overcome it we cut the sheets of blue acetate into squares and secured them over the lights using masking tape. Any additional lights e.g. the pro light kits we used were adapted in the same way as the general lighting within my house, with the use of bulldog clips.The video above shows some this process.

BLACKING THE WINDOWS OUT

3) Also within the adjustment and set up of lighting within the location of my house we realised that my bedroom was to light for what we wanted to film in there – this was due to several factors such as the white walls within room reflecting a lot of light. We thought through several processes that could resolve this including options on the camera as well as practical fixes, we chose to follow the practical approach and blackout the windows and therefore the natural light within my room. We did this with the use of black bin bags and paint friendly tape. The video above shows the process.

All of the work that we carried our in terms of lighting within our media production was influenced by the advanced workshop we participated in during class on lighting manipulation – without this workshop the lighting within my production would have been of a significantly lower standard as I would not have had the knowledge of how to carry out any of the manipulations we carried out. There was several shots in which the lighting took several attempts to get correct, this leading to the fact that next time I carry film I would pay more focus to the lighting within my production, even though our lighting was considered in the pre-production stages I would probably carry out more research thus allowing me to attempt more creative lighting styles within my productions.


PAINTING THE BRUISES

4) The final part of the setting up process had to wait until the actors had arrived – this process was painting the bruises onto ‘Grace’, although on set this process probably took the least amount of time the research into the creation of fake bruises was a long process. In order to learn how to create an affective and realistic set of bruises I carried out research during the pre-production stage: this including looking at theatrical websites as well as watching videos on YouTube. In painting the bruises onto ‘Grace’ at this point it also allowed us to begin the creation of our postcard designs for the marketing strategy of our short film as it enabled us to take the photos for it.

We discovered a technique during the process of filming ‘Bruises’ whilst encountering issues with continuity – due to the complexity of the positioning of our props within certain shots we had to do several takes of certain shots after realising that props had been moved. After a few retakes, we realised that a way to handle this would be to photograph the props thus allowing us to check the positioning in reference to the photo if in doubt of the positioning of props.

The filming within the holidays ran smoothly and unlike our first attempt we successfully completed all of the filming at my house within the one day - this meant that our next task was to film the remaining scenes at the second location. This location was our school, we had previously arranged for a class of year eleven students and a teacher to participate in our filming - with a very tight time restraint we didn't have time to pay particular attention to lighting and due to technical faults with the 85 filter we attempted to use we decided to just make use of the artifical lighting within the room we were filming to as well as relying on the editing we would later carry out to create the warm atmosphere we wanted during the scenes at this location - this section of the filming yet again ran smoothly. We then continued to film within a school art room, similarly to the last shoot we relied purely on the aritifical lighting within the room to create the similar effect.

However due to the fact that unlike the last class we filmed in this class had not been arranged by us but was an actual running class - this had both it's positives and it's negatives, the positives being that it created a realisitc and believable atmosphere and surrounding. The negatives including the way in which some people reacted to the camera - some people looked directly at the camera during filming, this meaning we had to do several takes of the same shot as well as there being quite a large amount of unwanted noise polution, this was so distracting that at one point we had to ask a girl on a sewing machine to temporarily stop whilst we filmed our last shot. Despite these minor problems, the filming was successful and relatively quick.

The final shot we had to film was one located in our school quad - this shot although simple and one of the shortest involved us finding the help of extras, we gathered people to fill the background of the shot to make it look realisitic as well as having people walk through the shot at timed intervals - one of these was specifically strategic due to the fact that when in the post-production phase, this movement would become crucial. There were two problems we faced when filming this shot -  1) the first problem was the weather, due to the persistant wind occuring whilst we were trying to film we faced problems with both the cast trying to remain in character as well as problems with the wind hitting the microphone and disrupting the audio. We solved the problem with the audio by covering the microphone with a thin piece of material, this blocked out most of the disturbance, once we had spoken to the actors and told them to not react to the wind everything ran smoothly. 2) The other issues we encountered was minor and not detrimental - due to our post-production plans we had to make our central protagonist 'Grace' move at twice the speed of everyone else in the shot, this took sometime to get correct.