Portfolio Project: Filming

 As we are working through the production process, my partner and I have almost completed the filming portion of our opening, The Seventh Lie. We had our actors come over around 6PM to have the perfecting setting for a family dinner, as it would take place at night.

To prepare, we cooked mac and cheese, bought an apple pie, and put together candles, flowers, table cloths, plates, and other props in the background to resemble a 'perfect' family dinner. Putting these props together, and organizing them on the table took us longer than expected. We meticulously placed each prop, making sure that it not only looked aesthetic, visually, but also that it would look good on screen and not take too much space, ensuring that the main focus was the actors.

We then turned on the mini mics and tested them to make sure they were working and that the dialogue would sound good in the recordings. After that, we began practicing with our script on how the opening was going to look like and sound like, deciding what pieces of dialogue we needed to do voiceovers for,  and certain parts that would need to be edited out. This helped us see visually how everything would look like, ensuring that our actors knew what they had to do. In addition to this, we explained to them the context of the film, and how their reactions/emotions and face movements should be in certain scenes. We wanted to make sure that the emotions and moods of the film were being perfectly conveyed visually.

One issue we came across was the dialogue aspect. As we would be doing voiceovers for the mother and the father, it was difficult for the actors to know when their cue was to say their piece of dialogue. To fix this, my partner and I had our script up, reading the voiceover dialogue in our head, and snapping when it was time for their lines, ensuring that the timing would fit and make sense. 

Another issue we faced was the lighting. The real light of the dining room was too bright, so we had to use a small orange light that was sitting on the cabinet next to the table, and a few warm lights in the background of the film. We wanted to have dim, low key lighting, making the scene feel like a typical dinner, while also dark and sinister

Using a large tripod, we moved the camera around filming the same scene from different angles, including filming extra scenes that we could potentially add in when needed. Retaking several scenes, the filming process took us a few hours as we wanted to ensure that each shot was exactly as we were envisioning it.