Shooting Day One
We had planned to begin our shooting on a Sunday mostly because of logistical and timing issues with getting the group together but plenty of things halted the process somewhat. The nights have slowly been drawing in as winter approaches, which means that we now have far less time to get the shots done that we need. Eventually, we left for our location at Langley Park two hours later than intended, which really showed us how rapid we had to be with our preparation for shooting and the actual production itself. After arriving, we dressed our set, decorating the "Heartwood Tree" with red thread for narrative and performance shots and set about obtaining the first shots on our shot list. We had two cameras available to us and so we used this to our advantage, filming a full runthrough of our Amanda performing the song from the treetops at two angles.
Once this had been done, we set about getting some more dynamic performance shots of our Amanda roaming the area around the tree, which we intend to use in the chorus sections of the song where the music is much livelier.
When we looked at these shots after packing away the equipment due to light constraints, we realised that the shots we had were quiet dark, although this may be possible to correct in post production.
Shooting Day Two
We had one major problem for this days shooting schedule - the weather. Our plan included getting to our next location, Black Park, early in the morning to allow us maximum time for shooting all the scenes we needed to get done in time. However, what we didn't anticipate or plan for was hurricane force winds overnight! We found out early in the morning of our filming day that both locations were closed until they had been deemed safe enough to enter again. This made us unsure whether or not we could actually film and in that respect, whther it was worth our time goingto a closer location to obtain shots that weren't reliant on having the parks as our centre piece. Thankfully, just as we made the decision to film what we could with what we had, we discovered that Black park only had been reopened. After losing a good four hours shooting time, we rushed down to film.
Whilst there, we managed to get a good collection of shots, starting with panoramas of the trees when the sun graced us with it's presence. With the two cameras on hand, we were also able to film our Amanda performing in the tree's whilst getting other, transitional shoots that we thought it best to have incase we needed them. We got the specific lyrical shoots for "and those greens and those blues", perfectly replicated by the green tree ops and then blue sky, as well as the opening shots, and shots containing the thread. Lighting was another key issue here, as well as some costume problems due to the cold, but this were easy to overcome on the day. Both the steady cam and the tripod were used frequently along with the cameras, but this was the first shooting day where it really hit home how much we had to film.
Shooting Day Three
This was not so much of a day, rather than a few short hours. Two members of our production group, including me, went to Langley park to film a series of nature shots needed for the end of our sequence. The sunset was truly spectacular and so we set about taking shots to focus on the specific lines of the song, representing the lyrics. "I will find a silver lining sometime" and "Blur my vision" were the simplest to achive, yet effect all the same. The sunset provided glorious lighting and colour yet at the time, we did not consider how this might imapct us later in post production, as each days filming looked very different because of factors like this. However, we were pleased with what we had, and if nothing else, loved the spontaneous shots.
Shooting Day Four
This was our biggest, most detailed day of shooting out of all our previous attempts. For this day, we planned in depth like we did for our film opening: we wrote a shot list out based on what we needed to film first and last, we planned to meet nice and early and even scheduled to the last minute. We had around 5 hours to complete all the shots we needed and so we had to make sure that we were ready to spend this length of time outdoors. This was paticularly crucial for Lorna, as our Amanda, who would be spending prolonged ammounts of time in the freezing outdoor environments in dresses that were not designed for the temperatures. As we began to shoot, we realised that this would be one of our biggest issues to overcome as it meant that Lorna could only shoot for a short period of time before having to wrap up in coats. Despite this, I did find that it made us a lot more selctive of what we were shooting in each area and made us much more aware of the time we had to spend on getting the shot right.
We began the day focusing our efforts around the heartwood tree once more as we believed that this would be the most pratical place to start. Given that the dressing of the area required a fair amount of time to set up with the red thread, we felt it best to get the shots we needed their first, in case we grew short of time or most importantly light towards the end of the shoot. The warm sunlight that we had at the begnning of the day worked well with shooting under the cover of the trees and I think that having worked with such dark lighting in the same location on our first day of shooting prepared us for working around lighting difficulties outside and knowing how to adjust each shot to make it easier to work with when editing the colour in post. We also decided to film from threee seperate angles once more, allowing us a little more variation to work with later on.
Once we had checked most of the shots from this location of our shot list, including both the ones in the tree and the areas around it, we moved on to the next area, which we nicknamed the photo tree. Here, we planned to string up magazine photographs on the tree and in the areas surrounding it, to get shots of Lorna tearing them down, representing her disregard to the fictional definition of beauty. As it was getting colder, we had to work even faster and allowed our Amanda a while to warm up as the rest of our group climbed the tree to string up the images.
Deciding to use only one camera for this area, we obtained shots from numerous angles, some with performance, others without. We had to plan carefully what we wanted to do for these, as once we had torn down the photos there was no way of getting them back up, especially with continuity in mind. For this reason, we rehersed each tearing down moment to get the one shot as near to perfect as it could be. In retrospect, I think it may have been a better idea to have cut double the amount of photos so that we could repeat the scene, as we weren't fully happy with what we ended up with, yet this was probably best in terms of the time we had left. Light was leaving us swiftly.
By this point, all the batteries on our cameras were nearly completely drained, even though we had prepared fully before we came out. Our last few shots ended up being a race against time, conserving as much battery life as possible. We filmed on the walkway area, getting most of the shots we needed by running frantically with the two remaining cameras out of the original three, making sure the dress shots were as visually dynamic as possible. We had to call cut when the last of the cameras run out of power.
Overall, I think filming went better than we had hoped, seeing us feel a little more prepared than we had done before the shoot. However, there are many things that could've been done to improve our results and I think most of this was due to having to work in such unpredictable conditions, which tested our ability to adapt and rethink more than ever before. Hopefully, when editing we will to use all the shots we obtained on the day and won't have to reshoot a thing, if all our planning pays off.
