Yesterday we completed our first shoot of the project, at Preston park for the Victorian sequence. I was extremely nervous before the shoot as this was the first time I had ever shot anything on film and I was ready to direct the scene. So after what was an absolutely dreadful start to the day which included ruining the museum property by off-roading onto the grass, leaving deep tyre marks, we got into the shoot. Fortunately enough the guy came around. At first he was furious, threatening myself and the producer by potentially not allowing us to shoot inside the museum. Rightly so, as we were entirely at fault. I thought we handled the situation very well under the circumstance. We tried to be as professional and as apologetic as we could. We collected £10 from everyone in the crew as a gesture of good will and as a donation to the museum, which the guy declined. Fortunately he saw our sincerity and even said we were welcome to shoot again. I couldn't be any more grateful and in retrospect I'm a little disappointed we didn't insist he took the money for the museum. It was such a perfect place to shoot for free, with access to a wide range of period costumes we were so hoping to find.
After a complete misunderstanding with one of the actors who didn't turn up (turns out he thought it was the 29th we were shooting) we decided to cast a crew member. Turned out to be a fantastic decision as the character he was playing was an artist, and the member of the crew we chose happened to be the only talented artist amongst us. There's another lesson to be had there in that our communication via emails with actors could be improved upon. I'm yet to learn whether we were at fault when coming up with the shoot dates, that will be looked into very soon. Below is an image of our crew member all dressed up in victorian attire on set, which we experimented with on the day. We had a few options but in the end I opted for a blazer and shirt combination with a matching bowler hat which finished the costume off very nicely.
The technical aspects of the shoot seemed to go very smoothly. The most daunting aspect is that the shoot went as well as a shoot can go, but from a digital filmmaker that might mean nothing once this footage is processed. There's a lot of suspense on a shoot using actual film as I found out, as every second that runs through the camera costs money. Money we have very little of. It's been drilled into us over the past few months of lectures and discussions about film that we need to be extremely strict with our timing and with our aperture. The production log was extremely effective on set, the producer managed to pick up every pro or con from each shot which included one accidental run of the film for a few seconds. Hopefully that means we know we had enough useable footage and successful takes. We found using the light meter easy enough as myself and a few others had previously used it when we had shot footage on a super 8 camera. I'd also spoken to a few fellow filmmakers about it, and I'd previously been on the set of a 16mm film shoot where I witnessed light meters in use which was helpful. Below are a few images of the cast and crew in action.
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