G321 - Filming Diary

Saturday 12th March - On Saturday this was when we filmed the voice over of the little girl (Lucy), we didn't actually have to film her in person we just needed her voice so this part of the filming was fairly straight forward. We were very prepared and had all our script ready so we didn't waste time, Lucy (who's voice we are using for our film) is only young so it was quite difficult for her to read the long paragraphs of writing we had set for her, this was a problem but we soon over came it. We split the paragraphs up into just small sentences so Lucy would find it easier to do and she did, once we had shortened them it took a lot less time. Lucy's voice is very young and sweet which is what we needed for our film, we needed innocence. Some of the lines Lucy said, we needed to make her say it a few more times because she either said the line to happy to sad or to slow or fast but in the end we got what we needed so this day of filming went smoothly.

Tuesday 15th March - This day was going to be the hardest day filming because we were going to film the most complicated scene (which was the bedroom scene), we had a problem before we even started filming though which was we only had one camera when we really needed two because they needed to be set up at different parts of the room. We only had one camera so had to try our best and make do with what we had. Before we filmed we wanted to have a run through to make sure things ran smoothly, we then had another problem because our female actor Ellie, really wasn't putting in as much emotion as she should of. She needed to portray the mum in a very destroyed way because she has just lost her daugther. We then had to direct her into how she could become this very emotional and upset character. Because we only had one camera we first filmed the back of Ellie (showing an over the shoulder shot), we had to film this numerous times because something kept going wrong every time, either the actor forgot her line, or there was traffic outside making noise, or the camera wasn't straight. We then went on to film the front of Ellie's face so we could show her emotions, we ran it through without filming and it went fine and then we filmed it and there was a dew problems, first the lighting went very very dark on the camera so we had to figure out how to make the room lighter even though it was day light! Then the second problem was Ellie's hair was covering part of her face so you couldn't see all of her emotions. We then re-filmed where you could see Ellie's face but the lighting still wasn't perfect but we just had to get on with it. When our Male actor had to come in and say his line "what are you doing", we got this bit done fairly quickly, It took a few takes though. We also then just had a shot of Olly walking in and saying his line, without Ellie being in the shot, we thought we could fit this shot in with the editing to show the variety of shots we used.
We finally got the bedroom scene done and then we had some more time left to film so we went to do the birthday scene, we had to change to a completely different location to do this. We though the bedroom scene was going to be quite simply because we only needed one camera to do it as the camera was going to stay in exactly the same place. It took longer here setting up than it did actually filming, this was because we had to turn a kitchen into a birthday party, so we set up banners, presents, balloons and even a cake so the setting would look spot on. Once we had set it up we then started to film and we didn't really have any problems, we obviously had to film the scene a few times because it never comes out perfect the first time you film it. The birthday scene was very simple to do and we got it done without having any major problems.

Wednesday 16th March - This day we were going to film the park scene and the home videos. We started filming the park scene and we knew this was going to be difficult to do because it is in a public place, when we first got to the park there was people in it but we wouldn't be allowed to tell them to get out of it because it's a public place so we waited for a bit and then they finally went. We first had to film a tracking shot of the park but we wanted to have the round about and the swing both moving, and this was very difficult because they were at opposite ends of the park. One of us had to film while the other one had to quickly move the round about and then the swing with out getting in the shot, this took a lot of shots but in the end we finally got it. We then came up with the idea of having a close up of the swing swinging with no one on it and then the roundabout moving with no one on it, these 2 shots were very easy to do and they were going to work really well in our film. We then needed to film Ellie in the park and we didn't stick to the storyboard or shot list here, we came up with a completely different idea, but it was much better than our original. Instead of just filming Ellie in the park walking along for the positive side, we filmed Ellie pushing the round about like her Daugher is actually there and she is smiling and being very happy, we then put the camera high on the climbing frame and face it downwards to Ellie holding her arms up, like the camera is it's child. She then said "come on, come down to mummy", we thought this idea was much better than just having the mum walking through the park.

Thursday 17th March - When we looked over all our filming we realised there was some major mistakes with the bedroom scene, the emotion of the character wasn't there and the camera angles we used were rubbish! We had used an over the shoulder shot of the mum looking through the photos of her child but it also showed the rest of the room and the setting but we then thought, the camera isn't focusing on anything in particular so we needed to re-film this! We also needed to re-film the bedroom scene because we needed more shots of Ellie and more of a variety because our camera shots were limited. We wasn't planning to re-film but we had no choice, we were able to use our female character (Ellie) but then we had a big problem (Olly) our male character was unavailable so we had to figure out to what we had to do. We tried to get someone to fill in but we had no one so we then decided to just go ahead and film Ellie and we would fit Olly in where we needed to when we were editing. We were much more prepared filming the bedroom scene this time, we had both cameras set up on two places of the room, one was focusing on Ellie's face and her emotions and the over was a clear over the shoulder shot of Ellie looking through the photo's, this only took a short while to film because it went smoothly (the only reason we had had to re-film was if there noise outside from the traffic) so it went well. We thought we would film the bedroom scene again changing the shots so when we came to editing we would have a lot of choice, we did an extreme close-up of Ellie's face because we thought it would really portray her emotional character. Lastly we came up with the idea of doing a birds eye view of all the photo's spread out on the bed and Ellie's hands searching through, this looked really good on the camera so we hope we can fit this shot into our film.

Millie