First day of filming - Abi Black

On the first day of filming we managed to get the first pieces of our film coming together. Although the weather was not in our favour the dullness added to the overall atmosphere of our film and the shots turned out quite well. We took a variation of establishing shots of the house and surroundings in order to give off the impression of it looking isolated. One of the things which we found worked effectively was using the manual focus to create different depths of field, one extremely nice shot done from behind the bush at an extreme long shot with the house blurred in the background.
Another shot which looked nice was the same idea, but taken at a much lower angle, almost on the floor where we had the grass in focus and the house shot out of focus. The only problem with this one was the camera had to be hand held as we couldn't get the tripod low enough and so it appeared quite unstable. The other things which we played around with during the establishing shots was the use of the pan, which we found worked more effectively when done really slowly.
We then moved inside the house to start filming our first shots of Milo and the use of mise en scene worked really nicely here. At first we had an issue with setting the white balance as we were using the Sony HD camera but after getting the hang of it, it looks very realistic and really good quality. We had quite a few props and were using the lighting to try and create the look we were after, which was the lower lighting and trying to make it look as natural as possible to reinforce the social realism effect. We had a medium close up shot of the fireplace with all of the alcohol bottles on it, to give a clear message about what was going on.
The other shots we got done were the ones of Milo in the bathroom, the first time we see him. We used the "mirror" shot which at first was quite difficult as we kept getting the camera in it so had to adjust the position quite a lot. Our actor worked really well though and put up with our constant re-takes on this particular scene.
Overall it was a productive first filming session and went really well although we had to race against time before it got dark to keep the natural lighting effect. Everyone had different inputs on what type of shots we could do and unfortunately I couldn't attend the filming session the next day although after looking at the shots on the computer they look very effective. We aren't due to film again until next week, in which we are hoping for clear skies to do the trampoline shots and the ping pong shots.