MM - Day 1 (20.12.15) Shoot Reflection

Day 1 was a very hectic shoot. We set the arrival time for 2:30 PM at Tom's House. We planned to finish at around 6:00/7:00 PM. We ended up finishing at 10:00 PM.

I thought the shoot went well. We had a little bit of time from when both of the actors arrived and when it got dark enough to shoot, to run through the whole fight sequence so that shooting it would be faster. We also decided to go through the detailed psychology of the characters, such as their personal history, motives and thought processes.
I thought this made the rest of the shoot much more efficient as we weren't making any new choreography or developing the character motivations.

I was the main camera operator on the shoot. Myself and Taran shared equal directing duties, such as conveying the vision of the film to the actors and discussing the characters with them. Taran handled more of the character blocking while I framed the shots. It required a lot of communication between us so that we would match the movement of the actors with the movement of the camera in a dynamic way. I was also in charge of lighting, meaning turning on and off certain lights in the location to achieve a desired effect. This was difficult as many of the lights were under the same switch as well as the family still being in the house. The only actual non-practical light source that we brought was an iPad. This was only used in the bedroom sequence, in which I came up with lighting up Ollie's face as it was quite dark in that corner. I experimented with a few colours, but liked the blue/purple colour as it contrasted the orange light in the room quite well. 

 

Since we had already been to the location previously and taken stills of most of the desired camera angles and movements, most of the shooting was according to how it was shot then. But there were certain moments in which Taran, in most cases, would come up with another way of shooting the immediate sequence and then we would discuss it. We did argue a few times during the shoot about how to film certain scenes and how it would play out in the edit. For most of those, we settled with a compromise and ended up shooting both ideas and deciding which to use in the edit. The reason why we were took longer then expected was because we took more time in the set up and execution of each shot. 

Day 2 of the shoot would be much more relaxed so I was somewhat relieved that the most difficult day was done.