Today we finished the beach shoot, and by this I mean getting the remaining shots we needed. As I have discussed in a previous post, due to the limited availablility of our actress we had to go ahead and shoot half of the scene with our actor alone last week. I went through the storyboards (thankfully this was a scene without dialogue, which allowed me to make this decision) and sorted through all of the shots which had just the actor in the frame, without need of the actress. Whilst this isn't usually advised, and it isn't something I'd ordinarily decide to do, I realised that this was a big scene and we needed to take a chunk out of it at whatever cost. The glaring issue was always the fact that we were shooting outdoors. The British weather is forever unpredictable, making this shoot a massive gamble. The two shoots were five days apart, and the differences in weather had the potential to be catastrophic. Keeping the eye on the weather weirdly enough been one of my major strong points with working on this film, as producer that it. It catches many students off guard and it has done me in the past. I'd evidently learned from that, and in deciding to shoot over Thursday and Tuesday, I made sure that the weather predictions were similar in advance of each day. The advance predictions up to a week can be quite inaccurate, nevertheless I had to take the risk as both days were showing sunny/partially cloudy predictions. I have to say the risk massively paid off and the predictions were spot on. The fact that we had intermittent clouds during the day helped us massively over both shoots. In terms of continuity, it guides the viewer to understand that the sun isn't simply disappearing, that it is just gone periodically before returning in a later shot.
We turned up to the beach to shoot at 12 o'clock today. We brought our actor with us, and met our actress there. We quickly set up the initial wide shot we needed overlooking the vast beach with our actress in frame. This is the first shot we were missing from the previous shoot. This was an easy shot for us to get once the cast were in costume (all black funeral attires on a hot day didn't go down well). After that shot we moved on to the over shoulder shots. As I mentioned in the previous post, we managed to trick the over shoulder shot by using black clothing to dirty the frame. Despite already having a usable take I deemed it necessary to get that shot again as there were subtle circumstances that changed for example the angle of the light from the sun. After getting those shots we were at around 2 o'clock, so we had a dinner break as the cast were quite hungry and parched. We were forced to trek back to asda in Hartlepool for refreshments as our cast were getting thirsty due to the heat. This took half an hour out of our schedule, which wasn't that much of an issue on the grand scale of things. We still had plenty of time to shoot, from 3 when we returned up until half 5.
Throughout the day, together with my D.O.P I managed to get everything I needed to make the scene the way I wanted it. This was in conjunction with the previous shoot the week before. Despite our complete lack of sophisticated equipment, we did a good job with what we have like we always seem to do. Our equipment to move the camera is what is lacking, not the cameras themselves. The quality and capabilities of our cameras is great, its how we use the cameras to create tracking shots and moving sequences. I have raised this issue many times with absolutely nothing back from the institution. It's an amateur approach to have when pushing students to achieve good things. We have a short slider, and a very poor performing tracking dolly which takes ages to set up and ends up giving you terrible results due to the chips in the track and because of how old it is. I have suggested a gimbal many times, which balances the camera through a calibration system and is a cutting edge piece of modern equipment. I have rethought out many shots through not having a way to track etc, which has damaged the quality of the film.
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