WE FILMED!

Very happy that Faye and I were able to meet up to film together because since I leave for my trip soon, it's so important that we get this out of the way now. We had hoped to film the whole opening, but since our big painting prop wasn't ready yet, we decided only to film the first half of the opening. This was, either way, still ambitious thinking because even though we only needed to film around 1:00 minute to 1:25 of the opening, we spent around 7 HOURS or more in production and filming. Very glad I had two camera batteries because we would charge the dead battery while filming with the second one, and vice versa (meaning we probably went through 4-5 battery lives total). 

Some behind-the-scenes of me setting up a shot.

The shot in the viewfinder.

The actual shot, and the first shot of our main character's face.

Some things I regret though is we would often redo shots over and over again, meticulously until they were perfect, when in reality the significance of the changes we were making was minimal. We redid a shot of our character pouring paint in a bowl 14 or 15 times when really any of the takes were fine. This would later affect us negatively because taking too long affected the amount of light in the room, as the sun eventually started going down, so by the time we were done filming, a lot of the shots were pretty dark. 

We had always intended to rely mainly on natural lighting from the windows, but I had forgotten to bring my ring light when bringing all my equipment, which was supposed to serve as a secondary lighting source. I was able to think innovatively and deconstruct a lampshade in Faye's house that we ended up using as practical lighting in the set, but also to control the lighting of different shots more accurately. Still, the sun was the most powerful, so shots when the sun was down were still darker. This of course can be somewhat resolved in post-production, but I do think what needed to be fixed was the time efficiency during production. 

This was more at the start of filming, where you can see it's clearly day.

This was shot later in the day, when the sun had clearly set, making everything darker.

Faye and I paused a lot because we decided to re-storyboard a couple of sequences, and we also got a late start on filming because we met up and weren't prepared. The day before filming, I was extremely busy the whole day, then went to sleep without making sure we had everything we needed for filming and got to Faye's house, and realized everything we were missing. Not good. I had told Faye the week prior that I probably had a friend who had an easel, but I showed up to film easel-less, so we spent around 40 minutes trying to figure out what to do (I called 2 different friends to see if they had an easel, then we looked at different stores that potentially had easels for sale, etc.) Turns out though, Faye's sister the artist in our film and the artist who served as inspiration for the idea in real life, had an art station already. So we never even needed to source an easel from elsewhere because Faye had one all along. Once we got it out of the garage and lifted it to the living room, we tore the living room apart, which also took a while. 

The "before."

The"after."

Overall, we spent 2-3 hours discussing and problem-solving instead of filming because we couldn't until we resolved those aforementioned issues. And even though we didn't have the time to film the entire opening, the fault was still on us for not having the painting prop prepared in time for us to film anyway. In the end, I am content with the footage we did create, however, in the future, I realize we need to make 100% sure we have everything accounted for and in order before arriving on set. That sounds obvious, but for amateur filmmakers, it's a lesson, hard, but well-learned. 

I'll be leaving for my trip this week, but I'm trusting Faye to finish painting the prop so that we can get the last scenes filmed once I'm back. Then we'll edit the opening over Spring Break since we'll have all our footage filmed by then.