Production day blogs

 First filming day:

On the first day of filming we all meet up at my house at 10 am which we spend approximately 30 minutes preparing the props and settings so that it fits with how I imagine in my story board. We will spend the whole day filming the scenes in Charles's bedroom, after preparing all of the needed props and settings we started filming. The scenes are lacking a bit in vibrancy since there isn't much natural light in some areas which I will try to fix during the editing stages. I felt that using any other camera modes is quite unnecessary since most of my shots need to be consistent and the lighting changes can easily be edited.

In the afternoon we continued filming at 2 pm, where the lighting outside is a bit yellowish which is how I imagine it in my story board but sadly the lighting didn't appeared like how it was suppose to look like so I just decided to fix in the editing stages. We mainly couldn’t get the right lighting on some spots of the room but this can be fixed in the editing stages. There is a scene where we need a POV shot, this shot took us around 30 minutes just to finish filming since some of the scratched clips we're either too fast or too shaky and it make it quite difficult for the audience to follow. I felt like my camerawork skills can be a bit better since some of the scenes take several tries just to get the angle correct. 

Props were good, exactly like how I imagined them except for the statue where it is a little bit too small. The statue was also too white which doesn’t get highlighted in the white bed-side shelf so we have to add a black surface below where we place the statue for it to show clearly. I also used a shallow depth of field to further highlight the statue. The costumes are like what I imagine, quite vibrant and casual clothes. The character fits with the description of my character design, but the physique of my actor is quite bigger than that of a stereotypical high school student.

In the end, the equipment is good, some scenes might have been better with a bit more stability in filming which is when a tripod would have been quite useful but the slight vibration doesn’t really affect much. Due to the properties of the room, we couldn’t film all of the scenes exactly like the storyboard so I have to think of other angles where those scenes would still express all of the information needed.

This is an example of shallow depth of field in my raw clips.

Second filming day:

On the second day of filming, we met up at our school to film shots with the background of the classroom and hallway. We started filming scenes inside of the classroom, we decided to turn the fans off in order for the dialogue to be heard, for the wind not to interfere with the camera’s mic and we set up the tables and chairs so that it fits with how my storyboard looks. 

For the hallway shots, we decided to change up the planning of where those scenes would look like, from the angles to the placement of characters, due to a cleaning crew also cleaning in the hallway at the time we’re taking the shots so we have to move the camera and fix the angle so that the cleaning crew doesn’t appear on the cameras. 

Example of usage of leading lines:

Lighting was also a problem while filming, some of the surrounding classroom’s light was still open which makes the hallway way too bright so we have to turn those lights off. Another problem is that the background noise in the hallway is too loud so I think using a voice over of will be a better option, that is also one of the reasons why I decided to change the angles and how some of the hallways shots are taken, like using a over shoulder shot to hide the mouth movement of the character so that it is easier to provide voice overs. 

In conclusion, I’d say we have done a good job for our production day even though there are a few inconveniences here and there. I think I as the director did a decent job at managing the crew, controlling the costumes and the setting’s light, I also did a decent job at giving out solutions to a few shots related problems. This experience has also provided me with a lot of experience in using cameras, using different shot taking techniques like shallow depth of field and more.