Construction Post 27: My Personal Contribution to the Shoot Sessions

During the shoots I filled a variety of roles and had a go at doing everything for myself, from directing, being on sound, dressing the sets and actually operating the camera.

As we were shooting at my house, I did the majority of set dressing the night before we would be shooting to save time so that on the day we just had to add the final touches to get the rooms ready to be shot in.

Bed side table dressed for shoot

Kitchen counter dressed for shoot

Whilst filming we realised that out of the three of us in the group I had the steadiest hand and so for the hand held shots in the street and those that had very complicated movement such as the one in the bedroom following Shania to the mirror, I took the lead. These shots were very hard to film as they needed to be as smooth as possible to ensure our opening looked clean and professional. Although challenging, I really enjoyed getting to do the hand held shots myself and it was one of my favourite parts of the whole process.

Me framing a hand held in the house

Me framing a hand held shot in the road

In addition, because I was the one on camera for these shots, I got to be really creative with the camera movement in the harder shots, making adjustments from our original planned idea if it wasn't quite working. A prime example of this was the bedroom mirror shot which due to the tight angles didn't originally go exactly as we planned, but with some experimenting, I found the best way to do it as close to the original idea as possible, whilst still keeping everything smooth and professional.

The runner's POV shots were also really fun to film, despite the fact that to stop it from being too shaky I had to run in a fairly weird way but I think, watching it back, they came out quite well.

I also took charge of one of the lights we were using for the stalker shots through the window. As the lights can get extremely hot I had to stay with it to switch it off quickly between each take so that the bulb didn't blow and no one got hurt. I had never used a three point lighting system before and so enjoyed getting to see how it all worked during filming.

Our group putting up the lighting system

For me, the shoots were so much fun and I honestly enjoyed everything that I did.