On Tuesday we filmed our second half of our shoot, whilst our first shoot was exterior, night, in a carpark we shot our second part as an interior, day in a living room/kitchen. Michael wrote the script for this scene, I had initial ideas of doing something slightly different but Michael adapted it to fit with what we previously shot.
I really want to try this shoot again doing what I want to do, if I manage to get all my other assignments completed and organised this week I really would love to use next week as trial week for seeing if my vision could come to life. I understand in groups you have to follow one vision and comprise a lot which is fine but I would also really love to direct and have control over the shots in a scene.
We shot at a house in Oakleigh and we used the kitchen and dining room. As our studio is lighting focused we really used this as our main area of interest. We made sure that we spent most time as a group discussing what looked best in terms of lighting and what we wanted to achieve. Camera shots, acting, script and location weren’t really our focal point. This defiantly helped us a lot. I think this gave us a lot of scope to trial different lighting looks and discover what looked best. The time we shot was about 11.30am so the daylight was really useful and was our main tool in terms of lighting. The kitchen and dining room also had blinds so this meant the light was easy to manipulate.
A struggle we encountered during the shoot was the availability of natural daylight. As we discovered on a winters day the sun went in and out of the clouds. This meant that at some points we had really hard light coming through the blinds and other times we had none and all. This posed a great difficulty in continuity. We initially aimed for there to be a really harsh light coming through the blind to create line and shadow but we couldn’t predict the change in weather. As a solution to this we could’ve put a light outside the window as a false sun however the location we were in was on a second story of a house so this wasn’t exactly achievable with the resources we had access too.
Nonetheless we made do with what we had, we also used atmosphere spray to make some of the light rays more obvious. This would’ve worked better with a harsher light coming in from the window, overall though I’m pretty happy with how it worked out.
Our key light was inside the room, we used an LED panel with a diffuser on it. Then our fill light was the exterior natural light. I think in general this was perhaps a bit too harsh from the inside and took away from the natural light. I think it wold appeared softer and more dynamic having used enhanced natural light through the blinds. I think perhaps this is something we could trial again, how best to use blinds with lighting.
I was an actress in this scene, and despite my inability to act in front of the camera I tried my hardest to make it as good as possible. Despite enjoying the shoot I would as already mentioned like to direct a scene myself. I think I have a lot of vision for what I think would look good and I don’t really think I got to collaborate much of that. I think in terms of this groups works its far easier to have one director and then follow that vision however in the future (and hopefully next week) I can trial what I want to achieve.
