Day One Filming - Evaluation

Wednesday 4th December was the first day of filming for our group, we arranged to meet at half 8 in goals in order to get to the first location and get filming as soon as possible however we had a few disasters as you would expect in this particular industry. 

Layla come with the first disaster that the dad actor dropped out last minute, this was the most drastic disaster as this was our third back up actor! We wasn't having much luck finding a reliable male actor, with the troubles of work and other commitments we struggled to find a replacement actor on such sort notice, we had to improvise, Layla would be the male actor! After a quick trip to the fancy dress shop to purchase a bold cap and a moustache we had solved one issue.

Unfortunately the young girl had issues with getting out of school, this is something that we had thought about and the girl didn't have a large roll in our video. After much debate and thinking we made the decision to cut the little girl from the video as we felt it was too disruptive to get a small child out of school, and we didn't want to use an older female as this wouldn't look realistic. 

The final disaster we had to overcome on the first day of shooting was the fact that the dining room table broke and we had no where for the first scene to be shot, we loved the location we had so we decided to find a fold up table and take it to the location as we couldn't bare wasting such a perfect location.

After Layla waking up late, and to a wash of disasters we didn't get to our location until around 12. We set up and done the shots we could however, from miss communication the person in charge of actors didn't get a exact time to the mother to appear so we didn't start filming the dining room shots until around half 1. 

Finally after solving all go the issues we drove to our first location - the dining room. We set up the scene, using the props we had brought and the table we had to go and get. Setting up took a little longer that predicted due to the late start and the extra work we now had to do. Nether the less we left extra time for mistakes so we still had plenty of time we just had to get a move on.

The set looked just how we imagined it, as a team we was really pleased as to how it had all come together, the location was perfect along with the props that we had gathered, it made the scene look, old vintage and boring just as we had imagined it.

The table cloth was also a last minute find from Laylas untie as we needed to now find  a different shape and size cloth due to the change of table. However despite all the issues the first scene looks quite good.




As i spoke about above the male actor was a problem. We had to use Layla, the bold cap was a good idea however we wasn't happy with the way it looked, we felt it looked to fake and like we was trying to create a comedy and we didn't want this. So we got some oil and made Layla's hair look more masculine, we applied some make up, glasses and the moustache and we was done.

This is me operating the camera, due to Danny and Layla acting i did the majesty of the filming however they both helped me set up the camera and we all spoke about what shot would look best and how it should be taken. Danny and Layla did all the filming they could, so for example if it was a shot of just Danny, Layla ensured she did it and the other way round. This was to ensure we all got a good go at using the camera.