Shooting the opening

 While shooting the opening, we encountered several problems, and this blog will describe how we dealt with those.

The first problem we encountered was actually weather-related. First of all, we planned for the park to be sunny while we filmed, to create contrast between the garage scenes and the park scene. However, as we were finishing up the last couple of shots at the park, it started raining pretty badly, which put the equipment at risk of being damaged, so we had to quickly pack up and wait under a pavilion for about 10 minutes. This put us further behind schedule, as we were already behind from our kidnapper William running almost an hour late. However, we wanted to keep filming as to not take too long filming at the park, so we took an umbrella from the car and kept filming. Luckily, the shot we got had a lot of tree cover, so it's not very noticeable on video.

 

This photo here is from the garage scene, where the girl is writing in her diary. This shot took a long time to get right because the way we had her knock over the lamp in the storyboards was unlikely, as she was writing with her right hand, and knocked it over with her left. But once we moved it, some of the shots we had in the storyboard left her face unlit or just didn't work as well as we had planned. After some adjusting though, we made it work. For example, for a shot where her face would be unlit, I stepped back and focused on the diary instead, and had the outline of her hair in the shot rather than her face. This made the shot look better and less murky.

To really sell the kidnapping, we used makeup to slim her face down and imply emaciation, and give her dirt marks and bruises to imply that she had been harmed in some way. This would raise many questions to the audience about what happened to her, who did this, and etcetera, which is what we wanted since the beginning of this project. Her costume was just a plain white tee that we splashed water on then stepped on a few times to get it dirty, which would hopefully sell the distressed effect even more. However, it didn't show up on the camera at all due to it being so dark, which is unfortunate. How we could have fixed this would be to spread the dirt more evenly so it would show up in every angle, rather than just the chest as shown in the image on the right.

For the scenes where she had already knocked over lamp, we hadn't planned anything for lighting during that moment, as we wanted it to be complete darkness, to display the semiotic code for fear and the unknown. However, once we started filming without the lamp, it was clear it wasn't going to work, as the camera didn't pick up anything out of the pitch blackness. To remedy this we used the RGB light we rented, set it to the coolest tone of light, and covered it with the translucent bag it came in to diffuse the light and dim it even further. On camera, it still came across as pitch blackness, but now the audience would still see the girl very clearly.

Overall, filming went very well, and although we encountered a few issues along the way, it worked out in the end.