Prior to my actor arriving I needed to organize my location so it looked appropriate. My story states that the residents of the house are on holiday, therefore I needed to make the house look less lived in. I also worked on the lighting of the area, and i set up an extra light in the kitchen area as I felt that the lighting of the room was to dark. I also set up things that I needed pacifically for my opening such as placing family photos on the table for the start, and putting lots of mail on the door mat so it looked like the residents had not been in the house for a while.When my actor arrived, I firstly made sure that he looked appropriate, by messing up his hair more, and also creasing and dirtying his clothes. When than started filming.
I was going to do the filming in the order of location, for instance I would film all the shots in the living room than the kitchen etc.
But instead i decided to film the shots chronologically, as others there could be certain props left in the locations which could effect the continuity.
As soon as we started filming I faced a problem. As I could not get the pan i needed to be the right speed. So therefore I had to film this shot over and over again. I filmed all the shots more than once prior to this, as that meant that I would have more than one option when editing.
One of the trickiest shots to film was the shot of my character from the inside of the refrigerator. I had to start filming, than put the camera in the fridge. open the fridge get the camera out than stop filming. This was quite a lengthy process as I had to keep doing it to make sure the camera positioning was right and to see if any items in the fridge were blocking view.
Another shot that was quite hard was the shot of my cat. I had to try and make the cat co- operate, and it was hard to make him stay in shot. So after many attempts I decided to just keep the camera going for a long time, and therefore I could just edit it, as i was bound to have a good section the shot. To make my cat stay in place I had to throw food in to the area. This took a long time to do.
The section where the character was doing up his shoes took very long. I arranged the camera in 4 different angles facing the shoes and the actor than did his shoes up. This is a part that I suspect will take the longest whilst editing, as I have four 7 minute shots that I need to edit into a 5 second section.
One idea that I had whilst filming outside was to have a shot of the character walking past the salvation army building. The organization has many connotations surrounding it, linking to homelessness which is a strong them in my film. I got this idea from the film This is England , where the characters are walking past a church.
One mistake i did make when filming, which I only noticed when I up loaded the footage was that my animatic was on the table in the shot. This was annoying, but I did not need to re film it as I had enough footage with out it. I made sure that throughout the day I filmed lots extra, particularly of the actor walking, just incase i did not have enough.
