Production Day 2

I’ll be honest, felt a little bit rough from the wedding but I was still up and ready on time for everyone to begin production. Yesterday I was advised by everyone else to arrange people arriving earlier just in case we have a similar incident to Friday.  We were meant to be focusing on just the basement scenes but due to the scenes we missed on Friday we had to ensure we were done by roughly 5 o’clock. I asked Peter and Heather to come in earlier even though I knew they would be waiting for some time to record, I just didn’t want to chance missing the same lighting as Friday’s scenes.

We began at roughly 10 o’clock with George and Phil, seeing as these two had rehearsed in this location previously we didn’t have to spend much time with another run through but we did one or two just to make sure everyone was comfortable with everything.  We again separated the control of camera by scenes, I wanted to have main control of the camera throughout but it was Jordan’s role so I just did my scene and the odd shot now and again.  We decided that we would do the scenes in this order; basement 1, basement 3 and basement 2, we decided this because it was easier, shot and length wise.

For the first scene I did the first shot of both Tom and Luke because I wanted to adjust the setting of the iris and white balance and thought it would be easier just to do it considering I was in position, but I noticed something was incredibly different. The area of Luke wasn’t lit enough but the box light was still on so I didn’t take any notice until after I did that shot and changed the batteries, which was the problem so we had to do the scene again from the first camera position.  Also during this we kept losing the fake cut on Tom lip and had to  remake it a couple of times until we decided that it would  be best if on the basement scenes he didn’t have the cut but instead a swollen lip, this would signify that much time has passed and it prevented us from stopping and going.

Doing  the scene basement 3 was easy enough to do until we got to the hugging segment as both of the actors were still strangers to each other and kept laughing when leading up to the hug, it dropped us behind slightly but we were able to finish this scene close enough on time.

The scene, basement 2, was quite easy to do just following the sequence of the scene. The only thing which I thought would be an issue was the vomiting segment. I originally imaged that we wouldn’t see Tom being sick and just heard him but everyone thought it would be much more effective to suddenly cut into him being sick so we had to mix some soups together and test it out, we practiced by being sick in a bucket, Phil was a very good actor but at this moment I felt like he was over doing it when making puking noises so I showed him first how I wanted him to do it.

We got almost every shot for this scene but unfortunately the redhead light started to overheat and seemed to be on the verge of blowing up so we were not able to get the one last shot which isn’t a big issue, I think we can work without this shot. The shot is simply Luke walking over to Tom whilst Tom is somewhat losing his mind. Once we had finished with the basement scene we carried on with the scenes we missed previously, everything was going as planned but Lewis came up with the idea of pull focus during the kitchen scene between him and the drugs. So we had to practice with that for a short while and what we got wasn’t a proper pulling focus shot but I believe it works.

Towards the end I got a call from Georges mother wondering about  the time he’d get home so I had to hurry the rest of his scenes which put me really on edge and resulted my lashing out on my little brother for ruining a shot.

We were not able to get the outside shots which are quite simply due to lighting once again so I asked if we could all meet up again tomorrow to finish off. Jordan informed me he wasn’t able to come because of travel issues which aren’t a problem; as long as I, Lewis, Christi and Phil are there then everything should be fine. 

Today has been a very successful day, just a very stressful one considering we were behind schedule but now I feel we are in a comfortable position and will have enough time to finish everything.