After yesterday’s shooting, we deleted almost all of the conversations and the parts that tell too much information. Because this new script is a lot more abstract and fits our purpose better. We also changed the father role into a brother. Because our friend Joey is just too young, and our mother actress and him doesn’t look like a couple at all.

Today we will shoot the parts of the daughter killing her mother, and redo some of the shots from yesterday. We tend to finish all the parts of the mother today so she won’t need to come again tomorrow. The killing part involves using fake blood again, for this scene we prepared a white robe for our actress so she won’t get her own cloth dirty. We also bought some bathroom curtains and towels to put on the floor the avoid getting fake blood all over the place. (It’s made of sugar powder…. very hard to clean up) As I proceed in the semester, one thing I have gotten better at is making fake blood….. Because I need to make a lot of it for every film 🙂

For this project we used the reflective board a lot, instead of the straight lighting we used for the previous video, the reflective boards made everything look more natural, especially when we used the 100mm F2.8 Macro lens, the scene looks very very nice. As we are redoing the parts from yesterday, we added a lot of close-up shots on the daughter looking at the parents arguing, these shots can be very nice transitions in the film and make a better flow in the final film.

The hardest part of today is definitely the killing in the bathroom. It is hard to make it look scary and unclear at the same time. To create a better atmosphere we even bought a fog machine. There is a scene where the daughter’s reflection suddenly shows up on the mirror, it is hard to make it look scary but not cliche at the same time, so we thought we should try some post production on that shot and see if we can improve it. The other scene is when the daughter kills her mother, the mother screams at the camera and waves her hand. It’s very hard to make this scene to look less awkward, because our actress doesn’t have such a high level of acting skills and this sort of shots look very old-school. This is my least favorite scene out of the whole film, it was very tiring for us to shoot because it was located in a bath tub, it was also very tiring for her to act because she had to keep screaming in a high pitch. By the way, one of the LED panels are broken again…….

Overall, we had a very productive shooting today, we manged to finish all of the mother’s scenes, did the changed version of the conversation from yesterday and even managed to shot some extra shots of the daughter in her room. The 50mm F1.8 lens and the 100mm F2.8 Macro lens are very helpful, the big aperture worked very well in the dark rooms and the shallow depth of field also looks wonderful on camera. The reflective boards really helped the lighting a lot and made the faces look less oily. The only problem was it needs a lot of helping hands, we had to ask the actors and even Kimi the house owner to come and help us hold things…. But we are happy with what we shot today and we are looking forward to finish it up tomorrow!