Shoot Day Reflection

This is a full overview of how our Shooting day turned out as well as my general thoughts throughout.

The day of our shoot started very early for me, I made sure to set my alarm to wake up sooner and have plenty of time to make sure I was bringing everything I could possibly need - any extra makeup, my camera, fully charged phone, etc… before heading over to school and sitting down at breakfast with Meadow, discussing our excitement and anxiously looking around to spot Max and Joy. Once the group was together, I handed Meadow the costume for her to calmly get changed into whilst we carried our props from our Media classroom over to the buses, making sure to quickly shoot some behind the scenes footage, then we were ready to go!

Around 20 minutes into the bus ride, I decided to start doing Meadow’s makeup - I wanted a closer window between its application and filming it in order for it to smudge less over time and look as fresh as possible, but still allowing me enough time to not rush it. It was all turning out very well, the wound prosthetic even stuck down exactly as I had hoped and my plan of using gel on her hair to make it appear more dishevelled worked out great! Until we ran into a small issue when the bus transporting us to our location broke down… This was unpreventable as it all simply came down to the faulty bus, so although definitely not an ideal situation, we kept in good spirits and mainly found the situation quite funny - I’d say it’s crucial for cast and crew to be in a good mood for shooting small projects, particularly one-day shoots like this one, so we were lucky we still felt confident. Whilst we waited for a replacement bus to arrive, I took the opportunity to take some cool photos of Meadow in costume and fiddle around with how her hair would look, unfortunately I didn’t work on her makeup as it would have looked extremely concerning to passerby's to see me covering her leg in blood with no context, but we had fun regardless and decided to have our lunch early in order to save us some time on the actual location to get straight to working. 

Once we arrived on location at Tulleys Farm, we unloaded all of our equipment onto some type of golf cart that the owners had very kindly and conveniently provided us with, this greatly helped with transporting everything, including ourselves. We soon got to our first set in the junkyard, and with great efforts to suppress how jittery I felt, we immediately got to setting up the camera or examining the specific cars for potentially useful shots. As a group we briefly came up with the order of locations and actions that we would shoot in order so that we were all on the same page, so after we had the basic plan and our first shot was set up, we began filming. Right away, I was incredibly relieved to see how similar the shots looked to the vision I had in mind since the start of our planning process, Max was extremely quick and fluent as camera operator, resulting in actually interestingly framed shots done with great efficiency - throughout this initial section, Max was the main camera operator whilst Joy and I switched around from being on sound, shooting behind the scenes footage, and touching up makeup/costume. My favourite part of the entire day was almost certainly filming the sequence of shots in this initial half where Meadow reveals the wound on her leg and rips off her sleeve to use as a bandage, this was mainly due to how satisfyingly accurate it was to my ideal version of how this scene would turn out and it overall felt like such exciting material to shoot.

We did have a few minor issues in that exact sequence with makeup and costume however, which were entirely my doing but I have definitely kept in mind for any future projects, as the tight leg on the trousers meant that they would slightly lift up the prosthetic wound whenever Meadow pulled them up for different takes, which slightly unstuck the side of the prosthetic as it had started to wear out anyway - I should have waited slightly longer before applying this wound on her leg, although I am not too concerned by this timing error of mine since I wasn’t expecting the bus to break down and create an even longer gap between application and filming, and I ended up somewhat fixing it with the foolproof method of simply adding more fake blood. Then, when it came to ripping up the shirt, the shirt’s material proved to be very tough to rip as Meadow struggled to tear it off of her arm - Joy and I did make sure to have tested the ‘rippability’ of the shirt the day before in our own time, I did find it fairly difficult to do but eventually managed, yet I had failed to consider that I had ripped it from a different angle, as well as the fact that I was with a friend instead of being in front of an entire crew with a camera pointed in my face, we did fix it however by simply snipping up a large cut in the sleeve behind her shoulder for her to grab and pull at, as well as using clever camera angles to take the focus away from this clearly pre-ripped sleeve.

The second half we had left to shoot was much more straightforward this time as we only needed two shots in the end; her running into the garage, and one long continuous take of the final action in the sequence. Filming a long one-take wasn’t my original intention at least as I had been planning for an admittedly much more tedious ending scene of the motorcycle surrounding the garage/shed around her, followed by a jumpscare, but the one-take ended up working very well as it built fear and much more intense tension from a quiet scene where you can only hear the Hunter’s heavy footsteps and scraping of the axe, desperately hoping the Survivor escapes her hiding spot in the car quietly. We also got to use a studio light that lit up Meadow’s face from within the car very nicely, and watching her wonderful acting in close up was a great moment. This shot was also unexpectedly very nerve wrecking for me, I had never attempted to film a long take myself before and when it came to my turn on the Camera Operator rotation, I didn’t expect to suddenly get so nervous just before hitting record and I felt my heart beating all throughout quietly stepping around without making any noise and making sure to call out the action queues on time, which honestly was a very fun experience that I would love to attempt again someday.

The only slight mistake I realised we made only after we had wrapped up was a simple annoying continuity error, where Meadow ran off in one scene whilst carrying her bag, yet the running scene straight after showed her empty handed, I’m hoping we can fix this by cutting the first shot a bit earlier or perhaps even cropping the bag out of it, but we will have time to solve that issue when we begin editing. I remembered another issue with the chase scene just before we called out to wrap up the day as I visualised the transition between the two scenes and how in the first shot Meadow ran from left to right, but is running from right to left in the next one, to fix this we filmed a brief shot of her running into frame from left to right, and then deciding to turn back around to run in a different direction - this fixed the issue with direction, but I’m slightly worried about location continuity as all three shots have different backgrounds, cars, and ground, yet it could also simply come off as time jumping to different stages of her escaping so I’m not entirely worried for now. I am overall not concerned about the editing process, mainly because I am significantly more excited and enthusiastic to start it more so than I am nervous, but also because I know I’ll get plenty of support and help from my very talented group mates in the edit suite just as we had offered each other on shooting day as everyone was so professional, efficient, and suggested plenty of creative input and their own skills to contribute so such a smoothly running day as a whole.