STORY-TELLING UNIT: Shooting 'Distracted'

Even though I had done a tonne of preparation for the shoot, I came face to face with a huge problem the evening before my shoot. I couldn't get to the studios to pick up all the camera equipment. Fortunately, I have a lot of my own camera equipment (DSLR camera, soft box fluorescent lights, tripods and microphones). As soon as I recognised that there would be a problem getting to the studios, I contacted Simon asking if it was alright for me to use my own equipment for the shoot.

Here's the email:

Once I had the all clear to use my own camera equipment, I was all ready to start my shoot in the morning.

Shoot day

09:00 - I began setting up the camera equipment, lights and microphone so that all was ready by the time my actors arrived.

09:30 - I picked up Jason from the station and took him to the first location, my house.

10:00 - We got to shooting straight away. After filming a couple of clips and checking them, I realised the sound wasn't as sharp and clear as I wanted it to be. I decided to change the location of the microphone and move it close to the source of the sound, this seemed to resolved the sound issues.

10:40 - Even with the sound issues, we managed to stay on time with the schedule. Alex arrived at the first location ready to shoot his first scene. His first scene actually took place just outside my house and again I experienced some sound problems. The wind interfered with the microphone. To resolve this issue we decided to film the scene again but with me holding the microphone closer to Alex and closer to the door he was knocking on. I then used this sound over the original video footage to resolve the issue.

11:00 - These sound issues set us back slightly, however, the next scene was very quick to film, bringing us almost back on time with the schedule.

12:00 - The rest of the shoot went really well, any sound that was slightly off was re-recorded to be combined with the footage when it came to editing. We were done at the first location by 12:00.

13:30 - We arrived at the second location slightly later than planned but got to shooting straight away in order to catch up with the schedule. I decided to firstly record the sound of the water so that I could use this as a consistent sound track for the clips in this location. I then knew I didn't have to worry about the sound for most of the video clips, only the ones with dialogue between the characters.

14:00 - In order to capture the dialogue of my character Kyle, I used a clip mic. This still picked up some background noise but this could be easily corrected when editing. 

14:10 - We ended up finishing the shoot really early as I captured all the footage I needed. The shoot ended up going really well with any issues being easily resolved whilst on shoot. The only issues that had to be resolved in editing were the colours and the slight background noise in the last piece of dialogue - but neither of these seem too challenging.

Overall the shoot was a success, I ended up only needing one day out of my two shoot days meaning I can now use this time to start the rough cut of my edit!