A Reflection on Filming

Initially, we only had two days to film. This did not worry me because I believed that for a 30 to 60-second film, two days - nearly 3 hours - were more than enough. Following filming, on the first day, I believed this was the case. However, on day two we began to run into problems resulting from poor planning. Thankfully this issue was generally negated by being granted a third day of filming.

Going into the second day we felt confident in what we had so far as we had shot a good chunk of our film already. Most of what we had left was coverage and a handful of scenes. However, as previously mentioned, a lack of adequate planning and poor recording by myself we struggled to film day two. We knew what we had filmed on day one, but lacked properly written recordings of what was shot and what needed to be shot - or even how we'd do so. Because of this, we spent nearly 60% of our time shooting unusable footage and/or planning how we'd play the game - something that should've been planned out before.

The third day brought us a lot of relief as we were able to finish filming the handful of scenes left we hadn't filmed during the second day. Our only challenge was that our cinematographer was unexpectedly out sick, so I was left to fulfill her role. However, thanks to the help of Kim and Sophie I did not need to do the hand signs for the scenes/takes. They would do that so I was able to focus on getting a good shot. This teamwork was appreciated and took a lot of collective stress off - we managed well and finished with a decent amount of time to spare on day 3. This allowed us to shoot a bit more coverage as well.

Overall, the filming went extremely well. Even though none of us are professional actors - obviously - Sophie and Kim did a stellar job listening to my directions when it came to how to act on screen in order to better portray their characters. What could've used work was planning and written recordings of what was filmed. This would've saved a lot of headaches as we were forced to scramble and guess what was or wasn't done. This primarily fell on me, and I could've done a much better job doing so. Leaving the filming period I felt extremely good about how it went.