Filming

Yesterday was a turning point for my short film because I started filming for my opening! I had been wondering who would be the main protagonist in the opening and one of my cousins agreed to be my actress.

I had given her the screenplay so she could look over the lines and read it in its entirety so she could understand the overall tone of the piece and make it her own. Originally we were going to have her dialogue filmed in my kitchen, but it was hard to find lighting that was nice and accentuated her, so we decided to film outside on my porch instead.

We filmed for about an hour, which seems like a lot for just about a minute of the opening but I really wanted to get her speaking from different angles and I wanted to get certain close-up shots for the more emotional lines.

I filmed with my iPhone 4 but I was pleasantly surprised at the quality. I uploaded the clips to Google Drive and of course it's not perfect high definition video but it's pretty nice. I'm going to be reviewing all the different clips within the week just in case we need to reshoot anything..

The location I ended up using worked well because it was very beautiful and scenic with the lake and nature behind, and that will help contrast with what the character just left behind in Venezuela.

Here are some pictures of my cousin while reading over the lines!

Screenplay + Shot List: check!

So today and yesterday I worked on finishing my screenplay for the opening and I wrote a shot list so I could start filming. I wanted to write down every single shot I wanted so that I wouldn't forget any part of it.

As I finished my screenplay, I read it out loud to verify that it wasn't going over the two minute range, and it worked out well! The total dialogue came out to about a minute and thirty seconds which leaves plenty of time for establishing shots and credits.

Some of my next short-term goals are to write and record the fake news bits that are the main sound element before the dialogue begins, and I'm going to have that done before this time next week.