Entry 11 - Coming out of room and Stairs

Today was the start of our film production week and we finished the Scene 3. 

I wanted to get a lot done today, so I started getting all the equipments during Morning Tea. I also had to sort out our setting, as I wanted to film at the Central Hall. Since I wanted to use the upstairs of the central hall, I had to go and search for Ms Rigby to get permission. Although I emailed her, I didn’t know where she was and time was running out so I had to run around school. When I finally got permission, I was extremely satisfied with the setting of upstairs, as there was this creepy looking attic. In the end however, we couldn’t use upstairs as we ran out of time. 

We didn’t really use our shot list throughout filming. This is because we wanted shots from a lot of different angles. We just used our shot list as a “base”. In addition, the shortlist that Dayna made us wasn’t really a shot list, so I asked her to just make Scene 3 into a proper shot list, but she couldn’t do that as she was sick. 

We spent a lot of time for the part where Dayna comes out of the room. Since this is the shot where she hears a creepy sound that will lead her to find the murderer, we wanted her to seem anxious and scared. Therefore, when she opens the door and looks out, there’s less frame space towards the place she’s looking. We shot this from different angles and camera positions as well. 

Dayna also thought of this cool shot where she looks through the keyhole and we shoot the keyhole. However, the keyhole was too small for the camera to capture Dayna’s eyes. Therefore, the shot just shows the keyhole being “covered”. 

We also went behind Dayna for a shot of her in action. We once again shot this from different angles and positions so that people could choose what they want for their edit. We had a close up shot of Dayna opening the knob, but I wish that she could have opened it slower. In addition, the shot is also really blurry. We didn’t have time to refilm it. 

We had to reshoot the shot where she’s walking towards the stairs a lot of times as; Camera wasn’t in focus, Dayna looked into the camera and the lighting didn’t seem right. We also tried our best so that the line in the background didn’t pierce through Dayna’s head. For this shot, Dayna just walked straight out of the shot so there’s a better link for the next shot where she walks closer towards the stairs. 

The shots for the stairs were a bit disappointing from the lack of lighting. At the start of filming, we tried patching the windows with newspaper, but it didn’t work because the newspaper was too thin. We could have gone over it with another layer of newspaper but we didn’t have enough time. 

Once again, we took the shot from different angles and positions. One from high, one from low, one from side, one from everywhere. We had to rush the stairs shot as we didn't have a lot of time left, but we still did enough stair shots to make everyone happy. 

We shot one from high because we wanted to show that she was not in power. 

We shot one from low to show that she's going to a place where there's someone more in power up there. 

We shot one from side to show that she's being cornered. 

All our shots had her walking out of the frame to show that she's losing power. 

Dayna wanted some close up shots of her feet, so we also did that. I don't think that I'm going to use it in my edit.

We wanted to shoot the attic today, but as I mentioned before, we didn't have enough time, so we couldn't.