Filming Day 3

As much as I do love filming, I am very thankful that I am finally done shooting and I can finally blog about my third and final day of filming (Total Filming Hours for this Project 17-20 hours).

The final film shoot took place at my school (Cypress Bay High School). The school has a massive campus, so there were tons of different areas for us to film, however, being a trailer we were shooting for we only chose a select few locations we believed would be beneficial for our project.

Locations within the school:

Niche in a hallway to use for conversation
Long Hallway to get long take walking shot
Classroom scene (Including taking pills and student interaction).

I honestly thought this was going to be the most simple filming day out of all of them, but filming at school came with a plethora of challenges I seemed to have forgot about before I filmed.

One - The sound Issues! People at my high school can be absurdly obnoxious and loud, so when we started filming in my teacher's Study Hall Class we forgot about how annoying it would be to try and edit out all the background noise. So to try and be smart about the situation, Tay and I asked the class if they wanted to be a part of our film, and many did, which meant that they cooperated with us. Did I actually need or take shots of all of the students. No. But hey it was a great way to shut everyone up and get out shots done.

The sequence of shots that took place in the classroom involved a lot of action matched of a paranoid Nora finishing her work very quickly as she sneaks a pill into her mouth. For this scene to make it look even more sketchy we placed pills in an old mints compact and got some interesting close ups and extreme close ups of this. And to make it look like she was taking a pill (we really weren't going to have our actress take a pill in school) I shot her at an angle where you saw more of her profile of her face at an angle, but it came out looking very clean and realistic and looked like she literally took the pill in class. This is one of my favorite strings of shots I have collected in my high school career as they all flow so easily into each other with some simple editing and it gives off such a sketchy paranoid vibe.

Two - Class Changes! We'd be filming an intense scene and everything was going amazingly until the period would end and the bells would ring and a mob of people would flood the halls. Thus, our shot and scene would be ruined or halted many times as bells and angsty students traveled around class to class photo bombing my shots (God I Hate People My Age).

Three - Security! Even though we had my actress approved to come in, security would be constantly coming up to us, so that got a bit annoying during a beautiful shot when you'd get scared with someone screaming behind you, "Where the hell are you students supposed to be!" even though it was both of our free periods (eye roll).

Here are some snapshots from the school shoot: