Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre – Week 11

Lights, camera, action!…

I write this with a grin on my face, we have officially shot all of the scenes for Rouge!! It took three shooting days, two of which went into the evening. What an experience! A lot of fun, and a lot of stress. The stress came from making sure we got it all done in time. We all had to trust each other and communicate the best we could in regard to shot types, actions, confirming lines etc.

Wednesday:

What went well:

Bobby was super organised and booked a lot of equipment for our shoots. He spent time watching tutorials on the best ways to use the cameras, lights and mics.
When it was time to shoot we all supported each other and made it a comfortable environment.
We improvised two comedic moments that should work well in the film.

Some challenges/learning experiences:

It took us quite a while to get set up and we needed to replace our microphones right before we started shooting. It was annoying but it also just proved how realistically, these types of projects can take so much longer than expected due to unplanned inconveniences.
We had a few planned spaces for filming, but when we arrived they just didn’t seem right for the scene, too much light, too noisey, unexpected people in the background ect. We were fortunate to meet someone who could give us access to a room in Building 100. Without his help, we could have been stranded, but as well, if we did not initiate a conversation with him, he wouldn’t have helped.

Sunday:

What went well:

We had so much fun filming one of our sense which involves Agent Whyte stumbling upon a TikTok dancer. Whyte thinks this dancer is an agent from the future so she approaches him to learn his “fighting” moves. The angles and camera movement that we captured were great and will be so fun to edit.
Our roles were evenly distributed and communication was clear, not one person was left to do all the work and we made sure to give ourselves a break to regroup our next steps forward.
We all kept a positive attitude and left the shoot feeling a sense of success.

Some challenges/learning experiences:

Unfortunately we had a member down this day. We feel like the shooting process could have gone a bit quicker with an extra hand but we defiantly managed and gave it our best. We were still able to capture a lot of footage on this day however it was not as much as we originally planned.
A large protest took place in the city on this day which we did not consider. While this did not effect us to a large degree, it did delay our filming progress.
Our final scene of the day needed to be cut short due to loosing the sunlight. We were prepared and did have lights with us, however it was not what we were hoping to capture

Monday:

What went well:

Woowhoooooo we have completed the shoot!
We progressed a lot faster on our final shoot day. We had all hands on deck for most of the day and it really helped move things along.
We were so glad to use our back up location for our “fight scene”…it turned out better than our original location! The scene took place next to RMIT Building 100, in the open outdoor space. We can pat ourselves on the back for having a few locations in mind, especially since we were going to be working in areas that are open to the public. Our final destination was perfect for our scene, it allowed us to generate more ideas of shots and angles, as well as not have interruptions from the public (other than a few loud trucks). We were also able to manipulate the space and make it look like we were in multiple different areas. This was because there were many corners, stairs, statues, walls and poles to use as different backdrops.

Some challenges/learning experiences

Again, we weren’t able to have all team members present for the whole day which resulted in a slower progress at the end of the day.
Some lighting was difficult to manipulate
This was discovered later, our lapel mics had not picked up the audio very well in some of our scenes. We will have to fix this is post production which is annoying. We have learnt from this and will use headphones next time when using external mics.