Philosophia: Productive Production Day!!

Hey hey hey!!!

Guess what? I finally filmed!!

Yesterday, afterschool, I finally filmed and helped record my friend’s project (talk about a big cinematographer, actor, director, writer debut)!! So let me discuss what actually went down!!

I first got to my friend’s house at around 3:30ish, we had lunch and went to work!! I have yet to export footage from my camcorder so the explanation of the scenes I filmed with it will be brief for today as I will try to stick with my storyboard for reference (switched a couple of things up during filming).

I first started with the scene where we meet the protagonist…

We knocked out scenes 1-5 in an instant (but with a couple of mishaps, rearrangements, or whatever you want to call it). For scenes 1-2, I wanted the main subject to be a dress, but we could not find one that matched my vision (within what was in our closets), soooo, we switched it up a bit and I decided to back up from the jean jacket “Charlie” was wearing (to cover up the dress we did have but had a giant stain on it🤦🏻‍♀️). It ended up working, so yay!! Next was to cover dialogue for scenes 3-5. When getting to that, we realized that what I had written did not sound organic when delievered, so honestly, a lot of the takes I ended up taking say different things because we just decided to improvise with what came out during that moment, but still following the structure and vision I had.

This is where the changes come in. From scenes 5-9, given time constraints, I had to switch it up. From scene 5, we actually did change settings (to the kitchen), and I had “Charlie” be preparing her cupcakes for her little birthday celebration. The her friend behind the camera would then take on the same/similar dialogue (remember the improv) onto scene 7.

Scene 7 to 8 was different in the sense that I did not transition from day to night, as by thinking about it, and considering the camera I was using (very old), it was not going to work, so we just did it during the day. A problem with this scene was that it involved a doorbell. Doorbells and dogs don’t mix. Because of this inconvenience, we had to make creepy girl coming in during scene 7 to say she brought her dog with her (which kind of makes sense?) (shout-out to Brownie, my friend’s dog, for acting). Scene 9 was also in the kitchen and it went great until we randomly just began to burst out laughing (I want to say out of tiredness) and had to re-record several times. The re-recording also allowed me to have space to re-think and change how I approached my characters or even how I said my lines. Scenes 10-11 were fun and simple to film. I zoomed in on the candles, made my way around the table and captured when “Charlie” blew the candles (for the last time🧐).

These scenes were also when things got funky. Because I did not have time or resources to print and make a whole evidence table, my friends and I tried taking creepy/unusual photos of “Charlie.” They were just of her which is unsettling. So, what I decided to do with these photos was to download them on my phone and have the mystery un-aliver reminisce on them and then move their phone-in-hand to eventually a unalive “Charlie.”

Just so you can see what I have to deal with soon, here’s the picture of some of the files I have to check on the camera first, delete what I don’t use, export and download!!