PROGRESS REPORT AFFILIATION. SHOOTING DAY 1

The 14th of May, the first day of filming, we started off by getting to the location at around 12 O'clock and began setting up. There were 8 people at the pub on this day and they all knew what time to arrive for as I contacted them via phone and emailing them the shooting schedules.
There was a section of booths at the back of the pub and I decided that's where all the equipment (Canon EOS 7D camera, Camera slider, two tripods, a shotgun mic, an LED light and headset) will go, along with a table for hair and make-up, we employed the use of make-up because we needed to some of the actors to appear older than what they actually are.
We had Amelia on make-up duty who was in charge of that, she achieved the look that we were going for and it also would have looked terrible if any of the rest, including myself were to do it.
The first problem of the day was that it took two hours for everything to get set up and ready, also it was the shooting day when we had more cast than any other due to the flashback scene, which we had to do that day as it was the only day that everyone was available so I put that in as the first day to get the biggest one over and done with.

Another main problem we faced was that the scene was meant to be set on a late evening, but the shutters weren't down so there was nothing stopping the daylight from coming through the windows and even with the blinds down on the inside of the pub it was still too bright to give off the impression of it being evening, especially with it being around 2pm. To first conquer this problem I made sure that whenever the windows could be seen (shots where the camera is positioned behind the bar) that I will set the ISO to 1600 (there was a lot of time going back and forth taking different dummie shots using different ISO settings but we finally were settled at 1600. meaning that the camera will not take in as much light and that we had to make sure that the characters were lit correctly and in focus. It all turned out well and good at the end of the day as it looked like the lighting we were trying to achieve to a degree, but we knew that we could still save the footage in post-production editing so not all hope was lost.

Almost every shot in this film was focused manually, the main reason behind this was because some shots called for a switch in focus and if the camera was put in automatic focus, you can hear the lens moving in shots, which I learnt the hard way from past projects, so extra time was spent making sure shots were in focus properly. In the shots of the flashback, i couldn't be behind the camera since i was also in the scene, so my friend Luke had to operate the camera, he did not need to operate any sound recording equipment for this scene as there was only narration for it. So because of this, I had to go between each shot to set up the camera for him.

The flashback was meant to be a dark and gritty sequence, so when we first set up the camera we
didn't like the lighting and we tried turning the pub stage lights on and every dimming them but nothing seemed to work. Until we experimented with the LED as it had settings on the back to choose how much power the light could be on, we ended up going for 78%, also we put a gel over the light to make it a pure white, bright light so that the scene felt isolated from the rest of the world and hidden, which fits as they are a bunch of criminals after all.

At the end of the first day, my first conclusion was that I completely underestimated the work that had to go into this film, although I thought i planned every aspect of production i knew that i looked over some important parts such as setting up. So there were some changes made to the schedule of shooting day 2, which was to start earlier and make sure that everyone was set up by a certain time as that took most time away from filming.
But with that being said it was still a fairly productive day as we got the FLASHBACK scene filmed and the majority of scene 1 too.

Here are some of the raw footage from today.