Shoot day

Our shoot Day was an energy draining and intense day of work, however we all got to expand our practical experience and knowledge. 

We meet up in our regular media class room at 08:50 am to get the smoke machine and gather our thoughts. Roberto brought in a bunch of wires, which where ideal since we could display  to create the illusion of the car being hot wired. However, we soon had to face the problem of Roberto  forgot to bring the hose, after a short discussion we decided to go on with everything as planed and look for a hose on location.  We took the smoke machine and headed up to the editing suite to meet Matt who supported us on the shoot day and Adam our actor. 

We talked trough the plan of the day and our Idea. A small change we made was to change the car/ set. We ended up filming in Adam's car since it was most easily accessible and Katie will come with us on the minibus and leave her car on school grounds. 

 Next, we gathered all the equipment and loaded it into the minibus.   

Our equipment was: 

a Sony X5 (With Zoom Lens)

Microphone Boom (Gun Microphone)

A tripod

After preparing all the equipment and also placing the smoke machine, the wire and the printed of documents in the minibus we walked up to the Cafeteria to meet Sasha our make up artist. Sasha had a bunch of special effects make up laid out and gave Adam the subtle but scruffy make up look we wanted. 

This is a video documentation of the Make up process:

Once Adam's Make up was ready we hopped on to the mini bus and after our 7 minute drive we were on location. On the Bus we talked to Adam about his costume since we  emailed him in advance and we agreed that he  could go change in his house since it is on the sit, we asked him once again to wear some jeans, a shirt, a tie and a waist coat to create the smart casual look we want for our Private detective.  

Once we arrived we started cleaning out the space and setting everything up, while Adam was getting changed.  The setting up process was quite easy since we agreed to work with natural/ provided lighting in the garage. 

This is a time laps of the process:

During the process we also needed to redo the suicide note we had I had prepared in advance, since it was too small and therefore unrealistic.  Once that was sorted out and everything was set up and Adam took his place lying down in the back of the car, we started shooting. We started by covering all the actions in the back of the car by filming the entire sequence in a close up, mid shot and wide shot. While shooting, coco was on the Camera, Jon was directing, Roberto was responsible for sound and I took charge of the smoke machine.
Afterwords we got all the other basic shots done, before going off to experiment with the camera angles and moments.

We were doing quite well in time, since we were aiming to wrap the shoot before lunch time and we managed to say within the time frame.

After finishing all the shots we still recoded some extra sounds. We recorder the sound of the car doors being violently pushed, the seats clicking and the car boot opening. Once we were cleaning up the location, I sat in the car with running engine and recorded a two minute track of the engine sound.

We were then happy and satisfied with our recorded footage and returned to school after a fun day of filming. We stored all the equipment away as well as giving the smoke machine back to the theatre department.

We thanked everyone who worked with us that day and celebrated, keeping in mind that we are now going into the long process of post production.