The First Shoot

The great comedian, W.C. Fields, is credited with the line, “Never work with children or animals.”

Well... We didn't have animals in our shoot, but we certainly had children. Our first scene involved the youngest member of the cast, my brother, Harry. At the start of the day he seemed extremely happy to take part in this film and was rather excited. When the rest of the cast and crew arrived at my house to start shooting, he got embarrassed and refused to take part. After much crying, he finally agreed to take part under these conditions. No one but me and him be in the room and that he plays with cars instead of soldiers. He's surprisingly good at negotiating for a 3-year-old. This meant that I had to direct this scene on my own and we had to change the story slightly to adjust from toy soldiers to cars. Not too much change, but enough to disrupt us a bit. The first scene took about 1 and a half hours to set up and shoot.
Unfortunately, we have no usable audio for this scene, as all that can be heard is me directing Harry. Give him a break though, he is 3. To rectify this, in editing I'll only use non-diagetic sounds. This will include music and I may dub it over using Foley.

We then moved on to our second scene and arrived at the Hethersett Memorial Playing Fields. Unfortunately, we forgot the football which we originally scripted James laying with. We had to improvise and have him play on some playground equipment. It worked well and I think this was easier to shoot than a scene with a football would've been. The match-on-action was quite easy to account for.
Luckily, James was very cooperative and easy to work with, so we filmed this part very quickly. I think it came out well, though some of his facial expressions were questionable.

The next scene wasn't filmed by me, as I'm in it. So that felt weird.. It took place in a spare room in my house, which we decorated to look like the room of our character, Alex (who is slightly insane at this point). We covered the walls with drawings and sticky notes, hung images on strings from the ceiling, placed a poster of "The Shadower" on the wall and placed the clay figure of "The Shadower" on a shelf with some candles, making a small shrine.
The room looked the part, but unfortunately was very cramped, making it difficult to have discrete lighting. We put the main light outside the open door, this casted shadows and didn't make the room too bright. The ordinary lights in the room made it look orange on the camera, so we opted not to use them. It also proved hard to operate the camera well in the confined space but we tried our best. Because we couldn't move very well, we did have to improvise some shots as the ones we had planned couldn't be used effectively enough.

It was an eventful day but we managed to adapt and push forward. We got all the footage we planned to, plus some other shots which we may slot in if they look good.

We plan to have our second and final shoot soon, at a local pub. We just need to organise it with the owners and then we'll be on our way to completing this film.

-BW