The second day's shoot was assured to be a more relaxed and less strenuous affair, as the shots we had planned involved far less 'action', and the success of the photography would depend on how we managed our multitude of extras.
Mishaal and I, some weeks prior to the shoot had organised a Facebook event, detailing the task at hand and our necessity for extras, and we hoped that those we invited - mostly close friends from in and out of school - would be able to attend and help us out. In the end we had nine people to work with, and whilst we would have liked to have more, we were careful about character blocking and positioning, ensuring that the nine actors we did have would all be in frame as much as possible. In fact, having more extras could have been detrimental, as organising and managing more people could have been very difficult and stressful.
Before the event started at 3 PM, I went into Tunbridge Wells to meet Pablo, purchase some glow sticks for use as props, and most importantly, buy myself a latte. After we, and the rest of the extras, along with Lara reprising her role as Giulia, we allowed some time for our crew to chill and familiarise themselves with each other, building the atmosphere of the party, whilst Mishaal and I made the final preparations to begin shooting.
We'd contacted several of our extras about bringing more props - George King brought with him empty alcohol bottles and glasses, and a set of Cards Against Humanity, a party game. Felix Atkin had also supplied Mishaal with a smoke machine that we used to further create the party atmosphere.
Giving the actors time to themselves was really influential in building realistic chemistry between them, something that we really wanted to convey on screen. This was also a task I took head-on, bringing as much enthusiasm to the table as I could, and riling up our extras to get them into an energetic party mood. It was vital that we built verisimilitude up in every aspect of the day's shoot, in the actors, extras, props and set pieces that we were using.
All things considered, the second day's shoot was a breeze. Our extras were incredibly co-operative, the shots we took looked amazing, and it gave us great satisfaction just to quickly look over all of the footage that evening, with the shared knowledge that we'd just passed a huge milestone.
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