This week is our shooting week, because the shooting location is at our friend Kimi’s house. We can shoot there because his parents went back to China recently and they will be back on Friday, which means we only have before Friday.

Before the shooting, we had a problem with the casting. The original script needs two parents and one daughter. However, it was a lot more harder than we thought, a lot of people was interested when we posted our info online, but a lot of them didn’t respond to us afterwards. We received 24 answers in total at first, but only two of them responded….. It was one mother and one daughter. So now we will have to find a father in our own contacts. Then we ran into another problem, because the mother actress is white, the daughter actress is black, and if we are going to find a father on our own, he will be Chinese. It’s clearly biologically impossible for a Chinese man and a white lady to give birth to a black child. Even if we change her to an adopted child, it will be hard to clarify the relationship between them and it will confuse the audience. As we are looking for a solution, the daughter actress also disappeared. So we had to find two actors immediately. Luckily we found two of our friends who’s happy to help. Because Samantha is sick today so I will have to take her role and do the main directing. Which is a very big challenge for me.

I have always been an abstract photographer, same for videos, so it is very new for me to direct a film. Especially this time we added so many conversations in our script, I find it very hard to do the composition. When I was shooting the conversation, I thought about how we are going to edit the footage together and use the composition to help making the cutting smoother. It was a very hard thing to do. So I had to do it in many different angles so Samantha will have more choices when she edits the video.

The other problem I had was the length of the video. When we were writing the script, we imagined a 4-minute long film, but when I filmed the first conversation, it already took longer than 1 minute. But that was suppose to be a short intro, the story hasn’t even begun! So we had to make some changes to the script tonight and do less conversation. Because conversations are too time consuming, very hard to produce and also gives out too much information. All the talking will make the film look less abstract, which is the opposite of what we wants.

Overall today’s shooting is more of a tryout, to get familiar with the house and the actors. Luckily out mother actress is very friendly and experienced, so all the communication went very smooth. All the equipment worked very well except one of the LED panels are broken therefore very hard to put together.

We just need to delete some conversations and keep shooting for two more days!