Day 1 of Shooting

Not the Start We Wanted...

Welcome back, everyone! Recently, we attempted recording our first scenes of our film around Christmas time, and it was quite the challenge. This day proved to be significant in the sense that it led to many changes in our film (see previous blog). In this shooting day, the original casting roles were in place: Edison as vlogger and protagonist, Rayyan as the dark figure and antagonist, Eugene as cameraman, and me as the assistive friend (I did not attend this film shoot)!!

Roles/Acting

After reviewing with my group mates, I found that the flow was quite well. Edison acted very well as the outgoing protagonist. However, an issue arose because the mic did not pick up on his voice too well throughout the film. This was a major issue as his monologue and dialogue was very important to the movie's overall structure. Eugene did a decent job as cameraman, making the Steadicam shots appear quite literally "steady." Rayyan attempted his best to be the dark figure, but he encountered issues between his mask and glasses. 

Lighting

Another MASSIVE issue was the lighting. Edison was lit quite well, but the forest environment and dark figure were extremely hard to see, making the setting and conflict in the film useless. We had opted for the dark to add to our suspense, but it removed every other element we needed, causing more harm than good.

Sound

During playback, we noticed we lacked sound factors in the movie. Anything as simple as the sounds of nature (tree rustles, walking on dirt, etc.) were absent. We will have to do a foley stage for some natural sounds, and will surely utilize sound effects in the editing process to complete our film. Additionally, as mentioned before, the dialogue of characters was hardly audible, so we will need to redo the scenes where we will speak louder and use a closer microphone. Sound and lighting were probably the most significant issues in our film, forcing us to do a re-shoot of the scenes filmed already.

Re-shoot?

Yes, we will need re-shoots of ALL the scenes. The re-shoot will consist of all the scenes involving the eerie forest in our movie (most of the film). We plan to do our reshoot on January 17th afterschool. We will shoot at an earlier time for better lighting, swap the roles to improve acting and voice projection, and bring better equipment. If you haven' t already, please refer to my previous blog post for a more in-depth analysis of the changes upcoming. We are confident in our changes and home these tweaks will pave the way for a successful filming day.

Day 1 Preview!