Production Diary - 5/12/14

 This film shoot was definitely our biggest one because we had the most amount of actors together at one time. This meant that as the Producer I had to do a lot of extra work to get everyone together.

One of the main reasons that I found this a lot of work was the fact that as we are filming with children I had to organise everyone through their parents and I had to make sure that on the chosen date they could get picked up and dropped off or I organised to drive certain members of the cast.

Here are a couple of screenshots of my conversations with the parents;

However I finally manged to establish a day when every actor was free, Sophie had to come an hour later which meant that she would miss out on filming one of the scenes which we had to do before it got dark. Nevertheless we managed to put together a call sheet for the evening of filming:

The actual evening went really well and everyone looked great and in-character. I was definitely pleased with this film shoot because we didn't really come across any errors or problems and we managed to get all the shots done which is especially good because this means we don't have to arrange everyone to meet again.

The one minor problem we came across was that during the location recce we had found only one room suitable for the 1940's because it has wooden stools and wooden tables, however we had forgotten that it would have gone dark outside and that would ruin the reality of it being set during a school day, luckily Hannah came up with the idea of closing the blinds so that we couldn't tell how light it was outside. The picture below shows me and Hannah practicing the focus pull in that room. 

In the first scene that we filmed on this day one of the bullies rips a page from Cassandras book and we then show a close up of the ripped page. The page that we wanted ripping was of a drawing of her family and the page tears her family away from Cassandra. To ensure that when our actor ripped the page it was in the correct place we scored a line in the correct place using scissors.  

If we could do this shoot again I perhaps would have practiced the focus pull beforehand because this took up quite a lot of vital time and we had to do this section a lot of times only to get one decent shot.