Shoot 3: Smoking/Tea Making Sequences

Shoot 3: Smoking/Tea Making Sequences

Sunday 18^th Sunday 2012

6.00pm – 9.00pm

Cast: Mike Evans (Homeless Man) & Lewis Marks (Support Worker)

Crew: Natalia Gonzalez, Finian Pye & Myself

Equipment: Panasonic HDC SD900, shot gun mic, tripod

Location: Midland Road, Old Market, Bristol & My House

What we did:

The aim of this shoot was to capture some extreme close ups of each character smoking, and each character making a cup of tea. The idea was that the audience will assume that it was the homeless man smoking, and the support worker making the tea. I wanted to film each character doing each action so that I can experiment with this in postproduction, possibly merging the opacity of certain shots to give the illusion the characters are actually merging into one.

What went well?

I managed to capture all of the shots I needed and was also able to capture a couple of nice close up and medium close up shots of both the homeless man and the support worker which I felt looked really good. These shots were similar to the shots in the beginning of Hunger where the prison warden is smoking outside stood next to a wall, except my shots are much closer than these. I’m not sure when or if I will definitely use these shots but I thought they worked well as potential character introduction shots as they simply show each character stood by a wall leaving the audience with nothing but their visual appearance to base an opinion on.

What didn’t go well?

There were numerous problems with this shoot. Firstly, I forgot part of Mike’s homeless man costume so had to drive back to collect it, meaning we were slightly later starting than anticipated – only 15 minutes but still enough to have to hurry a bit more than I’d have liked. Secondly, we were supposed to be filming in the tea making in the Bristol Methodist Centre – a homeless day center where I used to volunteer. I had picked up the keys from the manager earlier in the week but there must’ve been a double booking as there was a meeting in place in the main room where I had intended to film. The meeting was going on till 8pm, which was too late for me as cast and crew had other plans for the evening. We decided to capture the footage in my kitchen in the end. As the shots are all extreme close ups, the background isn’t too important as there isn’t enough visible to give away the location, I did quite want to capture some establishing shots of just the posters on the walls and so on, to give the audience an idea of the setting. This is something I can do at a later time if I still feel it is necessary. Finally, after having to rearrange a location for the tea making shots, we began to lose the light and being outdoors meant there was no way of adjusting this. Luckily I had the HMC camera, along with the Panasonic and my Canon 550D so was able to switch between cameras to find out which one worked better at low lighting- it turned out that the Panasonic was considerably better and we were able to get some light from a street light which is was hopefully enough to light each shot effectively. I have had to warn my actors that we may need to reshoot these sequences but I am hopeful that I have been lucky and that the footage is okay, as it looked good on the camera monitor.