Diving in! (Production Day #1)

You know what they say! Everything is better at the beach!

Today was our first day of filming! We filmed scene 3 today at the beach with Dani, Jakoob, Sebastian, and Kaylee. We decided to start at the climax of the short film and then progressively work backward and then, for scheduling purposes, visit the final scene on the last day (Sunday). Let's DIVE in! Hehe, get it? Because Bryce is pushed into the water in the story... puns, so fun. 

Cast Readthrough Session:

During school today, a lot of the cast had the same lunch so Jake and I decided to have a cast readthrough session of the final script before starting to film later that day. This way, the cast could ask us about the context of their lines, their emotions, their characters, and answering questions about the story. Since there were a few key roles missing Jake and I just filled in for them at the readthrough. The cast got a copy of the final script and the opportunity to experience actual VR. We figured that a lot of the cast had never actually experienced Virtual Reality before, so we asked to borrow two headsets from Tina (our awesome instructor!) to help them experience it. The theory was that not only was it a cool treat but also would help them infuse their performance with a sense of realism. Jake and I love new adventures and, well, we weren't not going to try it ourselves... 

The afternoon before the shoot:
In class, Jake and I blocked (choreographed) the entire scene on the spot. We took my pencil case, some markers, and pens, and got to work. Anyone not involved in our creative process must have been so confused because we looked like we were playing with toys. While blocking, we thought about character movement, reactions, camera framing, camera movement, and over-all composition. 

I had my free period before the end of school so I had to drive around the city to pick things up things from both of our houses and get our equipment ready for filming, which we intended to start at 4pm. Like I mentioned in my last blog post, we decided to film scene 3 at John Lloyd State Park which has public access to the beach. Being a Friday at 4pm, we were hoping little to no crowds at the beach. Jakoob (Bryce), Sebastian (Andrew), and I were a bit late to the park because of a small complication on the road. Once we arrived, we jumped right in!

Filming:

The “crackhead energy” was felt throughout the cast during filming! From the moment we all got to the beach, we began to hype each other up and have a good time, which created a fun and dynamic atmosphere for filming. During the summer, Jake and I both took on a paid internship as media interns at a photography organizing startup called RKVST; one of the things we learned from our time at RKVST was the importance of good audio. We watched

our fellow interns who had to rework bad audio suffer and I think that was a lesson to always have 2 different devices recording live audio. The camera we borrowed came with a small external mic, but we need something more receptive. However, that was the only thing we couldn’t book from BECON TV, a boom mic. That didn’t stop us though, not one bit. I figured out a way to power Jake’s desk mic with my phone and he had the brilliant idea to tape it to a tripod, and tada! We had a bootlegged version of a boom mic! ratatata! [popular reference among Gen Z]). Jake took on our sound challenge and I grabbed the camera to do the cinematography. 

The first decision we had to make was which way we wanted to record the fluidity of the lines (whether we wanted the entire scene to play out as we record that one angle or could we go line-by-line). Since there’s a great possibility that we have to cut lines for time purposes in the editing process, we comprised to do both, taking various angles of each line and or complete parts of the scene. Even with a finished script, we were marking up the script and making small changes like changing “y’all” to “you all” the morning of the shoot. Jake and I still expect to make changes as we go through the production process, after all, there are things we can’t account for yet.

Our very first shot of the day was going great for about 2 seconds, and then Jakoob (Bryce) just burst into uncontrollable laughter. And that was our biggest problem of the night; breaking character. We thought we could just skip the award laughing by working with stage actors, but noooo! That’s not what happened! Even Dani (Isa) randomly laughed, it turns out that even professionals break character once in a while too. To better exemplify what I mean, peaks enjoy this compilation I put together of the cast and crew bursting into random laughter! That wasn’t the only problem we ran into though, there was also sand… and lots of it. Sand on our bags, sand on people’s pants, sand in my pants, sand in our hair, sand everywhere…So FUN! We had to be extra careful with sand getting on the equipment and onto the cast for continuity purposes. 

One of the other problems we had early on was the tablet glare. Jake and I didn’t remember that the tablet’s screen gives off glare like a mirror, meaning it was hard to shoot. Thankfully, in the right angle with an increased exposure fixed the glare by matching it; thus canceling its reflectiveness. Also, Jake got some cuts on both legs while filming. At this point, I’m really just hoping that doesn’t leave a scar. Eek! 😬
Being it our first filming day, we had to shoot someone disappearing for the first time and… we weren’t quite sure how we were gonna make that happen yet. We had looked into a few ideas which included creating some effects on Premiere Pro by using YouTube videos. However, as I was playing around with the way I filmed a scene, the answer struck me like a listing bolt! Every time someone is eliminated, it will be paired with a sound to create a motif. For the visuals, by having the camera move behind someone for a few seconds, it gives the actors enough time to sprint out of frame. To better visualize it, here’s the shot of Isabella’s disappearance:

Near the end of filming as we were approaching the big scene when Bryce is pushed into the water, Jake noticed that the external mic attached to the camera wasn’t on for THE ENTIRE FILMING UP TO THAT POINT. I wanted the ocean to sweep me up and swallow me whole. Thankfully, Jake had been recording everything along with the scenes as we recorded them, so we have audio! On the other side, the audio isn’t synched to the video so we’ll have to do that manually which is extra work; we have to be painstakingly careful to synch it right. 

Before filming the water scene, we recorded multiple scenes of him getting pushed out of the frame as he had failed in. When the time came we only had one shot to get it right. After lots of coordinating and booking we were ready to film the scene one time and one time only. Jake was on the sound boom with me and Dani (Isa) was standing nearby with towels to help him warm up after he went for his little swim because it was progressively getting colder. The shot came out great and it was all worth it. Jakoob’s clothes were drenched in seawater and sand so I took them home to wash for tomorrow's shoot. 

The Photoshoot:

We ended the day off with a photoshoot! Everyone in the cast that was with us on that day got pictures taken of them at the beach with the VR goggles on. We plan on using these pictures for the website, key art, postcard, etc. We also plan on taking these types of pictures on every day of the shoot in order to bank on content for our other components of the portfolio project. 

Today was an awesome day! We had so much fun filming that after we were done shooting we all went for ice cream! I will be cleaning and reorganizing all the equipment tonight so that it's ready for tomorrow’s filming session! Surf on!