We shot our thriller yesturday and only had a few minor set backs mainly because the set did not match our set design. Despite this, we found a table and seven chairs, a bar and got Tom to fit a door onto the walls. It took us about an hour then to set up the poker table and lay out all of our props for example, ashtrays and whisky bottles. Props were very useful in the particular shoot as it makes to whole sequence more genuine.Once the smoke machine was turned on to give the set some atmosphere, it looked realistic and how we hoped it would. The lighting really suited the mood we were trying to convey in our short piece. We had one long dangling light bulb from the roof and larger lights that were attached to the ceiling. The next task was to do all of the boys hair and give them costumes we had selected earlier. All of the boys wore suits and had either their hair gelled back on gelled into a side parting. Some wore hats and others were given cravats, we decided that bow ties would not look that great in the final edition so we didn’t use them. Meggie, used make up to add age to them, she put eye shadow under their eye lids to make them look more intimidating.
The first shot that we filmed was suing tracks and a dolly. Niki walks into the poker room and sits down saying “deal me in boys”. The majority of the shots were done using a dolly, however we also experimented by using a tripod. The most enjoyable shot was using the lifting crane! We used it at the end of the scene when Luke gets shot. The crane lifts up the camera to show a birds eye view of the room, it was very effective and showed all of the players different reaction to Luke being shot. For example, Seyi takes the money and runs. Felix makes sure if he is ok and Niki steals his wallet and leaves. We also took close ups of each persons face and extreme close ups of their eyes. These were very important as it could be said your eyes can give everything away, especially in such a high stake poker game. Many shots were also taken on players dealing cards and putting in poker chips. There were imperitive to our shoot as it gives the game a more believable feel to it.
Another problem was that our shooting script was not detailed enough; we did not include the poker players speaking and their conversations about the game. Because of this we had a delay as we had to sort out what we wanted them to say. In the end, we had them speaking in their own languages. As our actors come from many different parts of the world: Germany, Korea, Nigeria and Ukraine it really brought effect that they spoke in different languages. As they all did this it gave a sense of knowledge that they have and showed that they be very important.
In terms or how the set and actors looking on the monitor, it looked very authentic. We were very pleased with this aspect as we were worried that as we could not use older people it would not look right.
When recording the sound we used a piece of apparatus none of us had seen before. We used a boom microphone, a long poll with a fur covered microphone on the end. It was one persons job to point it in the direction of the speech and anothers to do the "cable bashing". This was to ensure cables did not get mixed up and caught in a knot with eachother.
When filming i took on the role of cable bashing, montitor watching and directing. My most enjoyable job was coming up with ideas of what the actors should talk about and what they should be doing at different moments. Equally cable bashing also meant that you got very close to the action and are very able to see flaws in the production. As a team we worked well together and took a hands on approach to filming. We were all very capable and willing to do each job it takes to make the sequence to look good. In that respect we were very supportive of eachother and readily helped eachother on tasks. It was very important that we all switched what we were doing each scene and got involved.
We did not finish shooting in the studio until 5:30 pm. So it was a long day when we started shooting at 11:30 am, although I think we shot all of the scenes until we were all happy with them. Our last bit of filming was at a different location, although it was still on the school campus. We needed a shot of Guy (the killer) walking along an alley revealing his gun and looking very dangerous. After deciding on the walk way between the common room and the boy’s toilets, we set up the camera onto a losmandy spider dolly, and decided we did not need the light we had also brought. We took five shots of Guy walking along at different speeds, using different camera angles. For example we had one of him walking towards the camera then did another where we followed him down the walk way. The shot really worked well as there are pipes in the corridor and the light was scattered, casting a shaddow on Guys face. This made him look more mysterious and scarey.
All in all I think the shoot was very succesful!
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