For the second day of filming, we decided to film the very next day after the first day so we were still on track with our filming. For this day, the weather was finally on our side and we decided to film the second scene – the field scene.
In contrast with the first day, we needed to arrive early in the morning so we could get the best sunlight possible and for it to be warm outside as well as have enough time to take multiple shots of our scenes. Since it was a school day, we had the luck to only have the media studies class in our schedule for school, so we emailed our teacher about missing class to film, to which he replied it was perfectly okay.
I will be structuring this post in:
- Preparing and packing
- Arriving
- Costumes
- Problem 1
- Filming
- Problem 2
- Filming (part 2)
- Conclusion
Preparing and packing
For the preparation for this day, I needed to pack my accessories, Lucas accessories, makeup, hair products and some insect repellent. The next morning me and stela both woke up pretty early (around 8:30 am) and, since luca was busy until 11 am, my mom took us both to my best friend’s house where she lent me my costume (the skirt and the top) and helped me do my hair and makeup. In this time stela made sure that our visions for this scene aligned and tweaked the script a bit to fit our ideas.
Arriving
We arrived around 11:30 to Lucas’ house and began by unpacking, reviewing the script with him and eating some breakfast. We also discussed the location and how to get there and made the decision to not bring any lighting equipment since we will be using natural lighting.
Costumes
We started by checking Lucas’ costume which was a white button up and white jeans and then moved on to check my costume which was a cream ruffle long skirt and a cream flowy top. As I previously mentioned in my props and equipment, both of these costumes needed to be light coloured to ensure an ethereal feeling to this scene.
Secondly, after a lot of convincing, luca finally let us do his makeup which was just minimal highlighter and glitter around his eyes which elevated his entire costume. For my makeup I did a very light brown eyeliner with a lot of glitter and a glowy base to again reinforce the overall vibe of this scene.
Problem 1
Before heading out we just then realised that the batteries for the camera did not charge properly, which threw us off by an hour of filming. This stressed us out since we left with the batteries having 47% and 52%. However, we still decided to go and film since we were already there and ready.
Filming
After a 15 minute walk we arrived at the field. There we set up all the equipment such as the tripod and the camera on the tripod. We then selected our spots and started with our scenes. However when we began filming the sunlight was so powerful that it was extremely hard to see what we were filming so, after each take we had to stop to review the footage.
Problem 2
However, both camera batteries did not last for more than 1 hour, and we were not even halfway done, so we had 3 options from here. We could go back to the house, wait for the batteries to be charged for an hour, film our footage with our phones or return to film another day. Since we had no more free days to film or with such good weather we came to the conclusion that we need to film with our phones (my iphone 16 and stelas iphone 15). We tried multiple settings and the cinematic setting fitted perfectly for these scenes.
Another problem we encountered was the fact that a bit further up on the field, there was a farm hosting sheep so there were a lot of little flies around us constantly. This distracted all of us and made us pretty uncomfortable. We tried moving a bit further away from the farm, but the flies were constant, even though we all used insect repellent. The solution to this was to just simply ignore them to the best of our ability, and focus on getting our scenes done in time.
Filming part 2
After we started to film with our phones, this problem turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since we could see what we were filming, while we were filming and did not need to stop for every take to review our footage. Also this helped us be more time efficient since we were already accustomed to the phones settings and the phones were not as heavy as the camera.
The filming took us about 1 hour for a half of the scenes when the camera died and 1 hour and 30 minutes using the phone. This was great news for us since we expected our filming time to be a minimum of 3 hours but we finished efficiently.
Conclusions
Even though we had multiple problems and we were in a more uncomfortable environment, this whole filming day was a success. The filming part helped us a lot to understand the differences between filming with a phone and a professional camera and taught us that maybe less is more. Overall this day taught us how to handle problem and stressful situations, as well as how to handle uncomfortable environments.