This week in our Wednesday class we were given time to complete our fourth filming exercise. we were working in a group of 8, I was working with Alexander, Alexandra, Hannah, Chynnae, Jenny, Dylan and Liam and we were given two scenes: a complex, highly covered scene from Mad Men, involving multiple set ups. And a scene from Ma Vie Sexuelle, unfolding entirely in one shot.
I was first A.D on the Mad Men shoot. Hannah was Don, Dylan was Sterling and Liam was Pete, Alexandra was the director, Alexander was the camera operator, Chynnae was the boom swinger and Jenny was the audio operator. We went into the exercise very organised, with a highly detailed script, story boards and shot list break down. I even broke down the shot list further into the time required for each set up and shoot. We however wasted half an hour looking for the right location, until we finally settled on our first choice, and then spent a further 30 minutes during the shoot waiting for noises to stop and people to finish walking through the shot. This made the shoot take an hour longer than it should have. While I tried to hurry the shoot up, it was the most complex scene we had to shoot and took the entire hour. We also shot the scene line by line, effectively as though each take was an edit in itself, which created a very strange, ‘non-flow’ throughout the scene during editing. While I tried to get the group to shoot the scene the whole way through set up by set up to avoid this, our actors had not learnt their lines (which there were a lot of), so this wouldn’t have been very plausible. So, we instead chose to shoot it set up by set up and line by line.
As we went very far overtime, we did not have the chance to film our second scene on Wednesday. This meant that we had to come in on Monday, during the semester break. We found ourselves down two people. Chynnae was unable to make it to the shoot and Dylan fell ill. We managed to make do though and decided to switch all the roles around so that everyone would get a chance to do something they hadn’t already. I was already down to act in the male role, so Liam decided to be the camera operator, Hannah the audio operator, Alexandra the female role, Jenny first A.D and Alexander the director. While there was some difficulty with the line delivery and the variation in audio levels, there were very few issues during the shoot. There were a few takes where the exposure had suddenly changed in between takes and were unusable due to the detail loss, but we immediately corrected this in the next take.