Shotting Day 2
As what we have planned in the beginning, the beachside scene exists as the character’s imagination at the very last point of his life. Representation of the character thinking back to the day he murdered someone with the same weather when the sun was dazzling, at the very last point of this scene, character’s thoughts will be pull back to the reality by a loud sound.
Thinking back to the day we shot, I still felt a strain with all those unexpected elements. Firstly, the weather or the season I should say wasn’t proper for our script, originally the novel was based in Algeria, a very hot country in North Africa. Even though we thought a sunny hot day doesn’t have to be shoot in summer but at least the weather need to match the character’s lines which the sun was dazzling. We looked at the weather throughout the week, every day seemed to be cloudy and rainy, the sun only came out for few times on the shooting day.
However, we needed winds to blow away the tiny flower that used as a representation of the character’s mother, we have retaken the scene for so many times only because of the flower didn’t blow up at the end, when we shooting outside, everything is so unpredictable either in a good way or in a bad way. For example, the sun came out for a few times which was good that we have never expected to come out on that cloudy day.
The second shooting we faced the same challenge once again which is to get the ‘right’ camera coverage for our one-take shot, we spent almost 1/3 of our shooting time trying to get the camera coverage to the satisfactory angle, we didn’t know why but that shooting day must be one of the days that everything seemed to stir up altogether. Jialu is the director but also the actress for our first practical project, while she is acting she cannot see how she looked in the frame which also took some time to switch between director and actress. Once again, this shooting experience reminded me how important is to prepare everything beforehand including a plan for camera coverage and going to the shooting location for a test shooting.
Everyone was exhausted either the sound, the camera, our actress, everyone was so tired of the unpredictable, the freezing beachside and the unsatisfactory camera coverage. Before our actual shooting, we have looked at a lot of different one-take shot in films, dramas even music videos, there are a lot of them I have wondered how many staff are running behind each one-take shot. After the shooting today, I was also wondering how exhausting is the crew when everyone needs to run whilst the camera rolling. Although it was still a very good experience again letting us experience how much work there is to do before, during and after shooting, especially this is a creative production of your own, we want them to be perfect.