Shoot 3 - Michael McGroarty

We filmed for the third time on Sunday 21st of March. The shoot went considerably better than the previous two shoots. The lighting was a lot better than last time. The redheads, while initially being quite hard to create the right effect with, soon became easy to use. We had both redheads on, with one shining into the cellar room with the white filter, and the other redhead facing at a right angle away from the cellar just to heighten the light a bit. We played back the footage to check the light was okay; the characters were visible. Unfortunately, one of our actors pulled out the night before the shoot, so I had to be in the film. This meant the camera work was left in the hands of Tom. We kept to the storyboard, and improvised some shots, although due to the limited size of the cellar, having a wide variety of shots was impossible. The script this time round was longer, so when it comes to editing we'll have a lot more footage to play around with. last time we shot 10 minutes of footage over 3-4 hours, this time we shot 40 minutes in two and a half hours. Last time I edited our film, the finished product came to 4 minutes 6 seconds. Now the script is longer, and we can put the voice-over at the end, along with the credits which we will have to make shorter this time, the film run time should hit the 5 minute mark.

We shot the film line-by-line, and from roughly the same areas, so shooting the dialogue was done within a couple of hours. Afterwards Tom filmed a few establishing shots around the cellar; the barrels, a decrepit wall and the candle on the table. Looking back on the footage on Final Cut Pro, the footage is a lot brighter, and while some of the shots done hand-held are a tad too shaky, good editing should dumb down the shakes. The tripod shots are nice and stable, and because we didn't move the lights at all during the shoot, the lighting and shadows are consistent in each shot.

Posted by Michael McGroarty