Filming Blog: First Day Takes

This weekend we finally started filming. We initially had difficulties choosing a date because one of group mates was very busy this weekend, but we worked around it. The solution was having to film without one of our group mates, but we decided this was better than nothing at all. Then, we also had issues with the location because each park we looked at was far from at least one of our houses. So, we ended up filming at Wolf Lake Park, which was the farthest for me. We began filming at 5:30 PM to get the lighting we wanted, and continued filming for 2 more hours. Unfortunately, we did not get as much footage as we would have liked but we plan on going back a few more times. When we arrived we had to walk a short distance to reach an area where there were fewer people, however we still had some issue with people walking in the area. Additionally, we all helped out in some way, and I helped out by filming the whole thing while my group mates acted. I would say I did a decent job filming but because I am not a professional, the camera would shake sometimes or I did not get the right angles. We had some other issues filming as well because one of my group mates, the main character, had a difficulties staying in character, and she would often smile or laugh during the scenes. This made it hard to film correctly since in scenes where a character is being chased to be murdered, they normally would be very serious and scared. So, this was difficult to work around, but I would help out as much as I could by maintaining a straight face as I filmed her. This definitely got in the way of our ability to film as much as we wanted, but we did all we could to fix the issue. Moreover, some scenes we had planned out were more difficult to film than we expected. For instance, in a scene where the main character had to trip on the ground, we had to retake it many times. This is because each take was either too much of an exaggerated fall, or it was not believable at all. For many scenes like these we had to shoot it over 10 times, which took very long. Additionally, it was difficult overall to get the exact angles we had pictured in our head when story boarding. Overall, we did not film as much as we wanted and got about 25 seconds of usable footage.