My Experience on Our First Day of Filming

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Our first official day of filming went a lot worse than I anticipated. Not only had our original actors backed out last minute, but our editor was not present, so our director had to take on her role to fill in our shot logs.

We were mostly figuring things out as we went along, as we never had a day to film test shots or truly finalize our plot and script. We didn't have a layout of the store to reference, and really didn't know what we were doing. As a result, the first hour or so at the location was mostly spent testing shots we'd written on our unfinished storyboard. Filming when I didn't know what I was filming was an uncomfortable experience.


We spent around 3 or 4 hours at the location filming, and the results were generally underwhelming. We got shots that were beautiful (in terms of their angle, lighting, and composition), but had no general addition to the production. In fact, none of our clips came together in a way that expressed the story. This frame is the perfect example:  wonderful composition, beautiful lighting, but the shot this frame came from gave no true value to our film overall.


 The importance of prior planning was once again reinforced as the frequent confusion of the plot was throwing the entire group for a loop. We were working with minimal equipment; the tripod we typically use to stabilize the camera wasn't brought in fear that we'd be kicked out for using it, and our storyboard and script were both a mess.

The next couple of blogs will be diving deep into my criticism of this experience. Overall, this bad film day taught me a lot about trying to film on the spot.

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