Filming

So I have completed my first two days of filming. The first day started with me drawing up all the days storyboards to be filmed. These storyboards consisted of the main narrative shots and important cutaway shots. My main thought behind every shot is that it has to convey loneliness, depression, and time passing slowly. I felt these three points would be the way i would convey insomnia and a lack of sleep. My initial instincts was to go for a clock ticking, a tap dripping, trees swaying, and white noise on a television. I managed to shoot all of the shots i wanted. At first I had problems with the tap dripping due to the reflective metal surface showing me and the camera. I got over this by shooting from below the tap shooting upwards. The trees swaying was easy enough because it was very windy on the day I shot. The clock ticking wasn't so easy. I had to prop the clock on a stool to reach the height of the tripod. The clock itself had a see-through plastic cover which was reflecting the camera and the room. To remove any of the reflections I shone three powerful lights placed directly off frame right and left, at the clock and it removed any reflections. I then shot the second hand ticking around two or three times the entire clock face. I figured I could either speed up or reverse the shot for dramatic effect later on in the editing process. The white noise on a television was just as hard to film. I had to find an old VHS in my house to play and rewind which would give me the white noise I needed. When I found the white noise and tried to film it things were being reflected by the TV into the camera lens. So I got both my parents to hold the same large white boards above and to the side of the TV to cover up any thing in the room. This worked really well and I got the shot of white noise. I also had the editing process in mind for this shot. I thought I could have the irritating sound of white noise over the film to signify the monotony of waiting and being awake. My actress got to mine at 7:59pm. We got straight down to filming. I had story-boarded two specific shots I really wanted. The first being a single solitary eye open for a long time. This would be to introduce the character and it also ties in with the theme of the film. The second being both eyes looking down and then looking up straight into the camera. I just thought this would be a good shot and quite powerful and engaging for the audience to look at. My next instinct was to get a shot which could be later used for a time lapse shot. So I had a high angled shot looking down onto a bed in the form of a CCTV camera. I thought it would look like one of those studies were being carried out that you would see on a TV show about peoples sleep patterns. So I had Caroline shuffle around for ten minutes or so tossing covers around and trying to sleep. This will be speed up in the editing considerably to show time passing. We then sat down and discussed what we would do if we couldn't sleep. We both came up with going outside and maybe go for a walk. So we got the camera and drove to an empty road. We then proceeded to get some great shots of Caroline walking along the white lines in the middle of the road. Every time a car came past we had to run out of the road so we wern't killed and then start the shot again. I shot it from a number of different angles and then we called it a night.