I have only one word to describe my day on Saturday: stressful. I only have myself to blame, however, as I wasted the time I had to do some last minute planning the night before by watching Ru Paul’s drag Race instead. It’s becoming more and more prevalent throughout this FMP that I will need to start planning and working well in advance for my second year FMP to avoid this stress next time.

That being said, I have also found myself with a lot of problems which were out of my hands during this filming day and, I feel, I have handled them as professionally as possible. Needless to say, I was drained by the end of Saturday, and I hadn’t even got all of the footage I needed. I can’t exactly blame myself for calling it a day on filming as by 10:00pm we were nowhere near finished, I wanted to sleep, as did my actress.

I booked out a Canon 800D, as well as a camera tripod and a Rode mounted mic for the session. I wanted the best quality camera I could book out and this was my best option.

Although, pat on the back, I did get all of the opening “dialogue” done and the final part of the video completely recorded, even if some adjustments to the final production had to be made.

Because my dumb body likes to mess with me, I, of course, woke up with a migraine come Saturday morning, and thus my planned morning of setting up the back drops and lights was tossed away like yesterday’s jam (if you get where that’s from, we’d probably get on). I slept the rest of the morning off, I wasn’t due to start filming until mid afternoon after all. I woke up an hour before my bus was due so I opted to wait until I got back to set up. I needed to go into the city centre to meet my friend Kirsty, who offered to be my PA for the day in exchange for mozzarella sticks and hash browns. I also needed to pick up some fake blood from the fancy dress shop for my video, as well as meet Esme, my actress, from work.

Whilst at the fancy dress shop, I got the idea to pick up a masquerade style mask for £2.99

Although I didn’t really have a specific dress code/costume in place for this video, I knew that I wanted to keep a creepy and sexy feel to the whole thing. And with my colour scheme being a cool palette of reds and blacks, this mask was the perfect choice to try and incorporate into my video. Even if I didn’t use it, it was only £2.99 and would make a huge dent in my personal funds (I did end up using the mask and it was very effective).

Now onto the second problem of the day: buses. I was due to meet Esme at 2:45pm, catch the next bus home and complete all the main music video shots before 6pm when I was to meet my other actors Izzy and Luke. However, as you can imagine, this did not happen. Esme’s bus did not arrive in town until 3:15pm and then two of my buses didn’t even show up. By the time I got home, it was 5pm and I had an hour to set up my set and film all of my video before we went out to film the rest of the video. I did manage to set up the backdrop and camera/tripod and film some scenes, so go me.

Since the beginning of this project, I’ve been wanting to experiment with all sorts of techniques I haven’t been able to with past projects, and with most of these new things being post-production, one thing I was certain on trying was experimental lighting. I really wanted to use a red light for the final part of the video; it’s the most sinister part of the whole film and I want it to look the part. I looked into getting some red cellophane to put over my house lamps however I found a way more reliable option in my basement

Considering the location of this scene was in the bathroom, this meant I wouldn’t take up the little space I had by trying to fit a whole lamp into the room as well as a tripod and camera. By having these bulbs, it meant I was able to utilise the lighting that was already in the bathroom. I did find that during the daylight hours that the red light wasn’t anywhere near as visible and so I made the executive decision to wait until night time to film the scene in the bathroom.

And, if until now you thought I was having a bad day, just wait for the main event. It was finally time to meet up with Izzy and Luke when several problems came to light. The first of which being that I had left my mic at home on the table. Not that this was a huge problem considering I never finished the script but this now meant I wasn’t able to record any speaking whatsoever. However, all hope wasn’t lost at this point as I reminded myself of the Foley project my class did last term.

https://youtu.be/SWPHomyCOfc

This task went really well for me, I was very, very successful and, considering the dilemma I’ve left myself in, I could have been left worse off. This gave me a chance to show off my skills in create foley tracks, and my confidence in using Adobe Audition.

Amongst these problems, I also had to sort out a new main male actor due to Luke being too nervous, changing set location because of general public being in the way and in general having work with novice actors. This was my main problem for this day of shooting as only Esme took the role seriously. This has given me a few warnings for when I come around to doing my second year FMP; next time I will definitely look into casting actual theatre students and, if I have time, I will conduct a casting day before filming.

All in all, I wouldn’t say filming was a complete disaster, however there were some clear problems I had to work through. I was so stressed out from working on this film, I couldn’t film everything I wanted to and thus I will have to run another filming day, and this time I will only work with Esme and not have so many people show up.