Production

Shooting Day 3

I will divide the scene into four short sequences; the entrance, the drinks, the slap and ‘Wasted’. Before shooting we arranged the kitchen how we wanted it; i.e. put alcohol bottles around the room, crisps and glasses. While doing this shoot I remembered we have to keep our eye on the 180 degree rule because the camera will be going from Tom to me and back throughout the scene.

Today's shooting Team

Moritz - Camera Guy/ Co-director

Stephen - Sound Guy

Me - Director/ Actor

Tom - Actor

The entrance

The scene starts of outside, a long mid shot of Tom walking up to the door, knocking, Stephen opening it and greeting him. It took us two goes but thankfully we managed to get all of that in one take. We then filmed the same thing from inside the kitchen, it was tricky due to the extras in there as well be we got the shots we wanted.

The Drinks

This was so fun to shot from drinking alcohol while shooting and Tom’s ‘speech’ face made this sequence one of the most entertaining to do. We didn’t want this sequence to last for too long due to the short filming space we have to fill after the first and second scenes. We chose to do short close-up shots of pouring each drink then drinking each one. This will be editing to show a fast-paced sequence. There will be a shot of Tom’s ‘speech’ face between each pouring of a different drink. We chose rum and coke first then, 3 shots of tequila each then Jack and coke. Hopefully it’ll give it a nice effect; I tried to keep in mind camera shot rules like you can do a sequence of different close-up shots but not long shots. There were a few focussing problems but we either re-shot certain scenes or will use them to our advantage. For example in the last drink shot with Jack Daniel’s and coke the two shot MS was a bit blurry but because the ‘drunkenness’ meter on the side of the screen would be full we can use it to our advantage and incorporate into the video game style.

The Slap

We did the slap scene straight after the entrance scene as we knew we wouldn't need the extras in the drinking and wasted scenes and it wouldn't be fair on them to have to wait around. This was very amusing to film and took a good few takes. 
The slap shots didn't look right and because I didn't think it would be fair on Tom to actually slap him across the face we tried to think of an alternative, one of the extras said why you don’t have Tom dodge the slap, which was a good idea. 
We shot him in his ‘speech’ face for a few seconds (for the speech overlay), my hand swinging past his face as he leans back, gets up in a drunken way, opens the door, and looks back at me with a drunken expression before slamming the door behind him. The camera holds a close-up shot of his face then after I ‘slap’ him the camera moves up and zooms out so we can see a mid-shot of him look round at me, stumble out the door and slam it.

‘Wasted’

We went outside on Park Wood path, we filmed Tom stumbling around until he gets to the bench where he collapses and passes out. We filmed the stumbling in a long shot to mid shot with a slightly tilted frame to mimic his drunken state, then a high-angled shot of his body lying on the bench. It was really cold and around 11:30 at night so we tried to get this done quickly, we shot three sequences that can be edited together to get the desired finish.

I felt having been in both director and actor roles in other parts of the module I found it easier to do both in one shoot. Me, Stephen and Moritz collated and discussed ideas throughout the shoot, expressing what we liked and what we didn't, what we thought we needed to re-shoot and didn't.

All in all we had a good day; we went from feeling like we weren't going to make it, to actually filming the shots we wanted. We were filming for around 3 hours and then at 11:30 we decided we were done, all the filming was finished and all we needed to do was finish editing and the overlays. 
We've tried to include as many shot compositions as possible to keep the film varied and interesting, but obviously within reason and as long as they helped with story telling.