Filming 2 - Wednesday 12th - Carleys house

Estimated time: 3 hoursEverything went smoothly in getting the lights and cast to Carley's house and the costumes, make up looked really fantastic and exactly how we wanted them. The 'wind up doll' dress looked absolutely amazing, Carley had done a really good job on the key part and it looked really effective. Here are some pre-production photographs we took

Emily Jones putting on costume and point shoes, make up not complete.

Sam costume

Emily Jones, left (without full make up on) and Leah Cheung, right(with full make up on)

Make up artist Carley putting make up on Sam.

Carley putting make up on Leah Cheung.

Here are unedited images of what the cast looked like: Jodie and I were really pleased with how the costumes/make up looked like.

After we had applied the make up etc we began filming. Firstly, we began filming the 'wind up doll scene' with Em. We instructed her for each shot and filmed approximately 8 seconds for each shot so that it would be long enough to edit each one properly. We filmed each shot according to the shot list we had printed off.

We filmed lots of separate shots of the characters to make sure we had enough to work with and edit, for example, we did lots of shots of Leah Cheung and Sam dancing against a white wall. We also took a lot of stop motion shots on the SLR Camera, for example, shots of the Sam shutting and opening her eyes in a scary manner.

We also improvised a lot of the shots, filming Carleys bearded dragon, Gizmo. We positioned Gizmo on a table full of dust and an old fashioned sewing machine which added to the weird mise-en-scene. We also did up close shots of Gizmo to add effect, which meant we had to film up close for ages and wait for the creature to move as they are naturally still animals.

I found that the lighting was easy to set up as I had had an instruction from Kate earlier in the day. However, in Carleys room there it was quite a confined space and it was hard to position the lights pointing towards the cast. Also, I feel we were using the wrong Gel for most of the shoot, we used to blue gel which made it a bit too dark. In retrospect, we should have experimented with the lights more before beginning to film.

Half way through the shoot, both cameras ran out of battery! Luckily, we had filmed a lot. However, we had not filmed the vital part which was where the puppets slump over, showing that they are toys. This meant that we needed to change the end of the video. Jodie and I decided a good idea on Saturday would be to film Sam 'waking up' in my bed, implicating it was all a dream. She could then walk over to her dressing table (seen in previous shots) and a few of the props from the Puppet scene could be on the desk. This would add an extra twist to the video and make it slightly more relevant.