Evaluation of the Shoot Day

The shoot day was a long and stressful venture, although fun and interesting. I woke up feeling tired, nervous and excited. Our enthusiasm was maintained mostly by lots and lots of coffee. Firstly, we met in the studio, where the set we had prepared the previous day was waiting for us. It was exciting seeing the ideas we had formulated over the course of the last few months finally coming into fruition.

An obligatory on-set selfie.                                                          The canteen, our makeup area.

Firstly, we filmed the runway shot. It had been set up first as it was the most elaborate set and we didn't want to waste time putting it up on the shoot day. I was a bit annoyed at first, that the runway looked like a hospital ward but when we started filming, we saw that it translated differently onto camera. Unlike the thriller shoot last year, the roles were not fixed. The media department took a lot more control this year, leaving us to direct and organize the actors between ourselves.

 I would have liked to work with the camera, as that is what I enjoy and feel I am good at, but unfortunately there was not a lot of opportunity to do so. I enjoyed communicating with and directing the actors, as well as the lighting guy - as our video was highly dependent on lighting.

On the subject of lighting, I was a bit annoyed at the lighting in Hannah's rollerskating scenes. It was dark, frantic, annoying and completely distracted from the actual skating itself.

  Carlotta with her boxing gloves.                                                    Lizzie helping us focus the camera.

I enjoyed the prop work the most, especially when I got to watch one of the least enthusiastic and unsexy pillow fights I have ever seen in my entire life. The department told us that we were not allowed to break the pillows because it would be too much trouble to clear up so the actresses were concentrating more on not breaking them than they were on actually pillow fighting. The result was hilarious and something that we shall definitely not be including in the video. Similar were the boxing glove scenes. Clearly Carlotta had never boxed in her life, but personally, I was doubtful that she'd ever even seen someone box or even knew what boxing is. The lesson we learned from this was that things on paper do not always translate well onto screen and that we should have included it into the test shoot.

[pillow fight]

The actresses were all great but my two favorite to work with were undoubtably Phoebe and Romany. Phoebe. Romany had obvious screen presence and was nice and charming to work with even when it was clear that she was tired and bored. Phoebe performed fantastically as was naturally confident in front of the camera.

Overall, I was pleased with the way the shoot went. We got all the shots we wanted, some things didn't turn out quite the way I envisioned them but lots of things turned out better.