That was an interesting day, to say the least.

Here’s the end product: http://vimeo.com/91306147

Our Lenny film turned out ok, but the pre-production for it was a disaster and the shooting was a struggle.

In pre-production, no work had been done prior to the sunday before the shoot. I took it upon myself to storyboard the script, create a shotlist and enlist actors. Once I sent this out to the group, they caught on that this needed to be worked on and then we roped together two actors and we had a bunch of sheets ready for shooting on the monday.

Then came the shooting day. We all assumed our roles that we would be performing on our major film, so I was tasked with cinematography. Everybody screwed up on that shoot. Nobody was prepared for their roles, it was as simple as that. Ellen was lost as director, and Laura and Gabby didn’t quite know what their roles were. Ed worked sound well, but he learnt a ton from the editing and the errors with sound that he made when shooting. I ended up taking the director role, telling the actors where I wanted them in the frame, while Ellen questioned the cinematography I had worked on. I tried to keep to my role, but there were times where I had to stand up and take over or we weren;t going to get it done.

I’ve only directed films before, so it was in my nature to tell the actors what to do, but as the cinematographer that’s not what I’m doing and even though we struggled in our roles on the shoot, it isn’t my place to do that.

In terms of the technical side of shooting, i messed up a few of the settings, leading to a blue tint in all the shots (a happy accident) and some over-exposed shots. This is an area I definately have worked on and am now prepared for the major shoot.

We had a long group meeting afterwards and I think everybody has learnt a lot from the entire ordeal.