8 December 2009

Today, apart from uploading, we did some initial editing. The voiceovers were edited in place (some will have to be re-done due to the re-drafting of the script, but we still edited nontheless), and we're quite satisfied with that. Also, some initial choosing of shots from the footage we had edited had begun. We seem to have more good shots than I expected, but I expected very few, so that's not good news. I think one of the challanges we have faced is the timetable, increasingly. However, we plan to do the best we can and hopefully we won't run aground.

4 December 2009

This was the next work we did on the film, which was a re-shoot. We found when uploading the footage that there was a huge problem: we had made my sister walk all kinds of diagonals and hence the continuity was terrible. I also decided that I wanted a lot more footage, and with a clearer idea of what we needed and what we didn't need, we shot a re-shoot on Friday. Also, we needed to include the party scenes, but this ran into a problem: all the extras we had been promised disappeared at the last minute.

However, we had mostly success from thereon. I manage to lengthen the amount of time the film took by having Justin sit on a chair and drink more slowly. Also, we quickly made a decision to amend the script to set the film in a club instead of at a party, which works as well. We continued to use mirrors and emphasise the loneliness of the two characters. A lot more angles were used, and all in all, the film shoot went well.

There were one or two problems with the footage we discovered later. One was that we hadn't watched the camera carefully enough and there were one or two shots where we got ourselves in the mirror. But then again, this may have to be ignored or somehow re-shot.

22 - 28 November 2009

We did some shooting and uploading over this week. On Saturday, we recorded my sister's voiceovers and shot the movie (minus party scenes). I note that we did rather poorly. The difficulties we faced were that everything took longer than expected. Unexpected noises lengthened the voiceover stage, such as jet planes and vacuum cleaning. Also, it took some time to get my sister to say the lines correctly. However, in the end, we had some good takes. I think that this was a testimony to the warning we were given by Ms Wong not to assume things would go as quickly as we expected.

The filming stage was also difficult for several reasons. Firstly, it was hard to inspire the actress to act in character since the whole film revolves around the voiceovers and the cinematography (not to mention the music). Therefore, my sister's imagination was strained. But we did manage to get the boredom (she was bored!) and fidgeting from her. Some interesting angles of pacing were shot. Also, Justin did very well with the beer drinking and we got some interesting shots of various pacing and walking using the mirrors. I think that these shots may be useful. However, many of the shots may be unusable in editing.

All in all, it wasn't as great as expected, but it could have been a lot worse. I think we'll continue with editing and reshoots next week.