Reflective Journal - Film Shoot

Last week on Thursday, with the help of some friends, I filmed my 30 second narrative.

For a few weeks before that, I had been organising with two friends for them to come to my house to star in my film but in an unfortunate turn of events, Will couldn't get a coach ticket up on any of the days I wanted to film, and Callum couldn't get any more days off of work, so I was left prepared for filming with no actors.

So, I took to Facebook, because after a long and extensive search on StarNow, I couldn't find anyone remotely punk/metalhead looking whatsoever. It's literally only normal posh people on there, and I know the majority of the punk and metal scene in and around London, so if there WAS anyone who looked like that on StarNow, either I don't know them because they're not connected, or a poser. And I don't trust posers.

On my Facebook post, at the end of the day I had just about 10 people say they'd be able to come to my house to be actors/extras in the film. This was on the Friday the week before the shoot. I told them all that I would have a call sheet sent to them with location and time details by the end of the weekend, but unfortunately it was sent out on Monday.

When it came to the day of the shoot, two of my friends called and said they would show up for the acting roles: Liam and Jake. They both fit the profile of what I wanted and we were ready to film.

I communicated with my actors through phone calls, so I don't have any screenshots of emails to provide as I generally find email to be a bit primitive.

This was kind of a problem as I was expecting to have more of a filled up room scene for the establishing shot but only two people turned up to be the main actors, with no extras at all, which was a shame. Next time I will make sure that people are properly committed.

At around 1:30pm, myself and the production crew: Luke, Sam, Kieran, Natalia, Jade as well as the actors all sat down around the table and had a glorious feast. Chocolate fingers, Doritos and dip, walkers baked crisps and refreshing orangeade. It was a wonderful pre-shoot munch and as we sat around the table, I blessed everyone as my disciples. Only joking, I told everyone the idea for the film, showed them the animatic and the shot list, had the actors sign their talent release forms and with that, we were ready to set up and film. It was a productive meeting and everyone was on the same page and ready to rock & roll.

We got the soft box lights up and together on their stands, set the microphone up above the actors and then plugged the microphone into the macbook to record.

I had my camera on and off the tripod for various shots, at first I did each shot one by one according to the shot list, reviewed the footage and then got a few more shots for the clips that I thought needed to be re-done or the ones which would be difficult to edit.

At the end of shooting, we called it a wrap and I double backed up all of the footage from my SD Card - one copy of everything onto my personal hard drive and one onto the macbook I used (thanks dad).

Overall the film shoot went pretty well, and as expected. however I was quite disappointed that out of however many people, only two people made the commitment to showing up and taking part. I'm just surprised that the people who said they were coming would rather have stayed at home than be in a cool student film in exchange for free food and cider and deliciously refreshing orangeade.