Shoot 3:
Smoking/Tea Making Sequences
Sunday 18th
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.
