Reflection – Week 12

This week I completed my second shoot, for working title ‘Workout”! Nathan & I went to my friend Nick’s house in Northcote to shoot, where he & his housemate James would be our actors. I thought the shoot went wonderfully! I took this shoot a lot more serious than my last one in terms of wanting to leave with the footage to actually create a really engaging short film, and not just an experiment.

Nick was going to be our main character. We had him in a singlet, shorts and gold chain. It was a cold day so we appreciated his sacrifice. We realised to get the sweaty effect we would need to spray water on, but it didn’t quite work as we’d hoped.

Nathan was working the boom pole, while I was directing and operating the camera. My friend Harrison, who also lives in the house with James & Nick, was there also, and as a fellow film student, he gave me a few pointers and helped out on set for a while. It was a great chilled out atmosphere, as we weren’t in a huge rush, there was only one setting, and it was fun and relaxed.

I had drawn up some storyboards the day before as to get some ideas as to what shots we wanted. I wanted lots of close up shots of Nick while he was lifting the weights, from various angles. I had one money shot I was planning on which was from directly in front, at his head height, slowly zooming on his face. The lighting was great on the day and all these shots came out really well! When James came in to do his couple lines, we experimented a bit and let him try lots of variants, some more aggressive, others over the top and others more reserved. I’m not quite sure which I’ll go with yet. One minor setback I noticed afterwards though was that his voice was recorded a little high, and as a result most of it is slightly distorted. I’ll have to see what I can do with that.

While we were shooting I had the idea to shoot a few silly moments of Nick doing some exaggerated ‘masculine’ things, such as drinking a beer, taking a mark of a football and aggressively trimming some hedges in the garden. My idea is to, instead of going directly from the working out into the neighbour interrupting, to have a short dream-like sequence in between where Nick is imagining himself doing these things. I think this will lengthen the film slightly in a good way, adding another wrinkle of filmmaking fun to the idea.

As much as I have complained about working in groups while shooting, I totally understand after this shoot. What’s most important is the crew is all on the same page and wanting the same things. When you have people not keen to be there or always checking their watch to see when they can leave, or people who are confused and not totally engaged with the idea, it can turn what is a fun and exciting day into a real chore. This was not that at all and I had a great time on set!