Filming!

 Production Day!

Today was both rewarding and absolutely exhausting! Based on my previous blogs, I think many can tell I am a very anxious person and have been during this whole project but filming today was good reassurance for our project. We managed to film everything we needed, but like anyone who has worked on some form of production would know, things will go wrong and you will be forced to adapt. Time was the number one factor we knew we had against us, so while we were filming we cut some shots and scenes we deemed weren't necessary as they didn't flow with the story or add anything to the context of our film. Originally we planned to have a scene where the protagonist goes into a room and finds a knife or some other tool to showcase they are scavenging, however we realized that this was just unnecessary filler and we decided that if we wanted to get done we had to cut it out. The other main issue we faced was lighting. The context of our film opening is our protagonist is exploring an abandoned building for supplies in a post-apocalyptic world where one would assume there is no power anymore, because of this we filmed in low light situations as the lights in the building were off. To work around this we used natural lighting and a light kit as best as we could to still create the low lighting effect of the shot, but also still see our subject. Also we made sure to have our iris as open as possible and bumped the ISO, we didn't want our shots to be too grainy but there is a level of balance between wanting low grain and also wanting to actually see your shot so some shots we just had to deal with it. Also for the shots in which we were filming from the perspective of a security camera, we had one person go to the top of a latter with a camera and another hold them from behind to make sure we were as safe as possible. Sabrina brought make up and fake blood to make herself look dirtied and roughed up, which helped add to the mise-en-scene of our film and our characters look. She added extra shading under her eyes to make herself look tired, messed up her hair, and added fake blood under her nails and to her arm under a bandage to make it as though she has to take care of her self. Lastly, although we did use a tripod for some wider establishing shots, we realized that to get the realistic and intimate effect that we wanted to portray, especially for our genre, we switched to primarily close hand held shots. All in all, I am really happy with the progress we have made and I really think our film opening will come out well. It might not come out how we expected, but that's the fun part, right?!