Construction Post 22: Our main shoot session

After the pre-preparations for the main shoot, we decided to create a shootboard to plan out the day. We tried to improve on the previous one by staggering the arrivals of the actors more, as well as putting shots that had similar set-ups together, which we failed to remember to do with the original one. Otherwise it was a very similar process with the same purpose of making sure we knew exactly what we had to do on the shoot day.

One page of our main shootboard, showing all the different things it kept track of. Click to enlarge.

While everything went quite well this time, we didn't allow any time for mistakes- so when we realised we had incorrect lighting for a set of shots and had to re-do them, we fell behind somewhat. However, overall the shootboard ensured we stayed on track and got every shot we needed, and thanks to hard work on the part of both the group and the actors, we ended at the planned time despite any problems.

This shot was quite long, and had to be timed well so that both pictured actors turned to look at the third entering actor on a sound cue. We allocated this shot extra time, therefore.

In terms of the actual process of shooting, we all rotated between different jobs to keep everyone on their toes, and tried to follow the lay-out of the shootboard unless at the time of the shot we decided a different allocation of jobs would be better.

Here Sayo operates the camera and listens to sound, while Jack is preparing himself to act in the next shot with a script in front of him. Of course this leaves myself as the director, and after taking this picture I wrote in all the information onto the clapperboard and got into position in front of the camera. Click to enlarge.

This was quite a good system, as well all got to add our unique touches to each aspect of the filming, and none of us got too worn out doing the same job for the whole day.

By the end of the shoot we were all happy with what we had done- all the preparation had paid off as we had no problems that arose from organisation and so on. It was a definite improvement from the test shoot, as we have learned both from organising and carrying out that shoot, and managed to avoid any mistakes this time around- for example, we avoided incorrect lighting in one of our montage shots.