Reshooting

So we finally found a location and time to reshoot those horrible office shots. After stressing about this, we did eventually fix our mistakes. We went to the Verizon building where Taylor’s mom works and she was able to talk to the security guard to let us in and film and do everything that we needed to do. We felt a lot better about filming this time because we had no time constrictions and we were almost alone in there so there were no distractions or unwanted figures in the background (like the school janitor).

We started to prep for shooting when we got there, doing things like setting up the mise-en-scene and everything to make it look like the detective’s office that we envisioned. Everything was going okay, until we realized that we forgot the newspaper. This was kind of disappointing because that was only the most important prop in the office scenes, so we had to make another newspaper. We searched around the office and found a newspaper on someone’s desk and just took it. Taylor mainly worked on redoing it (because p.s. she was the one who forgot it, don’t tell her), but this actually worked in our favor because this newspaper looked a lot more realistic and matched our time period better, being in black and white print.

After we got the newspaper and props all sorted out, we started to film. From our first time shooting, we added a few more lines to the script, and since our actors are not professionals, they struggled a little bit with memorizing the lines (mainly Tommy) and creating the proper facial expressions. We ran through it several times and shot several times as well. One problem we had shooting the first time was with continuity, which is very important in film. This is because we would cut after each shot, and this was our mistake. This time we kept the camera rolling throughout the entirety of the scenes from a single location and did this a few times from different angles. This would allow for some comfort room, because continuity would remain constant and we had different angles that we could cut back and forth from in editing to achieve our desired goal.

We also had a better plan this time because we actually had a proper storyboard that helped with the cinematographic aspect of production. We were able to smoothly continue with the process of filming with our plan instead of having to take the time to come up with shot ideas as we went along. Sure, we thought of stuff as we shot to make it better but this was still a lot more smooth and easier to work with.

We continued to film according to our plan and we then watched back our footage that we had. This was a super important step because we were so tired from filming that we were just about to leave and call it a day, but after watching it back we realized that we had missed a couple shots that would have been vital to preserving our continuity. So we were really happy we caught that before leaving, because if we had to come back to reshoot just that part the whole feel that was already established might have changed because of the weather, people and other factors.

This day of shooting was definitely a success and we are exciting to take this footage into editing to put it all together and get a step closer to completing our title sequence for Into the Truth.