Filming!

I was extremely nervous and excited on the day of filming, I was excited because it was the first chance for me to create my idea and direct everything exactly as I wanted, and have a sense of doing something very productive. However I was also nervous because although I had left plenty of time incase something went wrong and was fully aware that this was a possibility, at this point I did not know what this was going to be, and what effect it would have on my filming.

Despite these initial nerves, both my actress and I arrived at our location in a very positive frame of mind, excited to get underway.

We first went and set up our equipment in the hotel bedroom, and we were lucky enough to have been given access to the honeymoon suite, therefore we had plenty of room to work with and accomodate our equipment. We were well prepared to shoot as I had the shooting script I had already made, telling me exactly when I need to be filming which parts, and what I needed in order to do this, so that was a huge help and managed to help me avoid any extra and unnecessary stress. However, the first problem we faced was that the room no longer had a grand dressing table with mirror as I remembered, so we were unsure as to how we going to film my establishing shot, an over the shoulder shot of Lauren looking in the mirror. We managed to remove a large mirror from the wall and balance it very carefully on the dresser, and with great care and caution, we eventually managed to get a successful shot.

The next issue that came to our attention was that at a certain point in filming I wished to do a shot panning across the room. However as I went to film this, we realised that the room was full of modern items, and these were not appropriate for the time period my film is set in. We then had to stop filming for a while and ensure that everything modern looking was removed from the shot, and the room ended up with most of it's furniture shoved in the bathroom!

After this minor setback I was rather worried as to whether or not we would be able to keep up with the shooting script, as the sun was starting to set and I did not want to be filming in the dark.

After several attempts, making my actress run up and down many flights of stairs over and over again, I managed to get the shots of the staircase that I wanted.

We were then ready to move outside and start filming out there. I found that this went relatively smoothly and most shots were successful after a couple of takes.

I was also very thankful that we had good weather, windy and relatively cloudy, which was the ideal weather I was hoping for to add effect to the loneliness my character is meant to be feeling.

I was very happy once I had completed my filming, and was confident that it had gone well, and I had managed to get some really good shots that would be effective in my piece. I also found that I finished filming an hour earlier than planned, which was fortunate as we did not have to film in the dark.

With my all my filming having been successfully completed in the one day, I was now ready to upload my footage onto the Macs, and begin the editing of my piece!

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