Extra filming days

Filming Day 3: 

After referencing back to our Storyboard Schedule, we decided to film all the shots that required just me as I was acting. This included Shots that involved the corridor and the main room. This was a very fun and smooth day, since learning from our previous filming mistakes, we managed to plough through many of the shots, and even added some creative flair to some. Yes, we did have a lot of retakes, but that’s expected with first time film makers (we took around 71 takes). The corridor shots were a little complex because the lighting would tend to reflect of the wall to brightly, leaving a visual bright circle on the wall and other times, because of the corridors narrowness, the brightness of one colour would overpower the other, leaving a strange blend of colour. So, a lot of adjusting had to be made throughout filming. We filmed for around 3-4 hours, everything was not done yet, we had a few shots left, however, it was getting late so we left. 

Filming Day 4:

I was not able to arrive on that day, so Yehuda took it as an opportunity to film all the yellow shots, since they required no actors. He asked a friend of mine to go and assist because there were a lot of props to carry and move around. This was the day where he finally used the wood planks and Styrofoam heads. But before that part we had to film some roses, and the water drop shots, When I arrived we also used this as an opportunity to film some shots of the location. We went back to the room, placed the roses on the stool, filled a cup with water from a toilet sink nearby and started dripping water on the roses, in turn, creating a puddle on the floor underneath. I then used a macro lens to film the drips of water landing in the puddle. From there we moved on to the shots of Autem’s office. We scouted around a bit and eventually found a perfect room right around the corner from where the main room was at. My friend ended up having to leave. It was filled with construction items and other materials, which I decided to just keep there and use in the movie. After around 30 min of organising and rearranging I started filming. Around an hour later, I got all the shots needed. 

It was a good learning experience to be on my own, it made me resourceful with the props found around the location, and gave me freedom to create the room how I would imagine Autem would layout his office. 

Filming Day 5:

The final filming day, the day I put my ‘serious director’ hat on. Originally, I was meant to film 2 days earlier, but complications occurred with the filming location and we had to postpone the filming day. Filming day 5 is the Blue shot days. The day we needed Jonathan, my 6 ft. 7 in. family friend who kindly came back to finish filming the movie. He came on the first filming day too, but none of the footage was used of that day. It was a stressful day; a lot of retakes were done on this day. I wanted to perfect everything since this was the last time we will be coming to this location, let’s just say we ended up with around 120 takes. This day was work intensive and took a total of 4-5 hours to finish. However, all the results ended up to my expectation and I was very happy with what I got. 

I learned a lot from this day, especially on how to work under the pressure of time and malfunctions. Right on the last day of filming, the lights in the main room decided to not turn off for some odd reason, so we had to turn off the lights for the whole corridor from the fuse box, however, there were overtime construction workers working at the end of it, who needed the lights. We kindly asked them if we could turn off the lights, thy eventually said yes, but they gave us 40 min, and walked off to have their break. And on top of that, Jonathan is not a professional actor, therefore he needed a little more takes and patience, but he put his full effort resulting, in some very good takes to end up using in our final film.