Filming continued.... - Alex Lloyd

With only two afternoons to spend on filming last week I had to organise when our actor was free, one thing I have found throughout our project so far is that we have had to rush some of our filming due to lack of organisation around our actor. I have learnt that it is very important to know exactly when your actor is free in advance, our problem was that we knew exactly who would be best for our part and didn't ask whether he would be free enough or not. That put aside we have managed to scrape a few afternoons this week in our timetable as well as having tuesday and wednesday last week. This week I had to visit the set and film alone as the rest of my group members were not free the time Milo was. I managed to visit on Monday shooting the shots in which we have a bottle slowly falling and then crashing onto the ground. This was a difficult shot but became easy due to the camera I used. The camera I managed to book out for the week is the large Sony HD camera, this has everything the small Sony does but is larger and has many attachments. One advantage of using this camera was its inbuilt slow motion technique, this made our shots look very smooth throughout the slow motion as doing this on Final Cut Pro can sometimes become a little jaggered.

Wednesday was planned to be the big day where most of the filming had to be done, Milo was free from half past 3. We managed to film a lot of rushes building enough footage to make half the film. These shots included Milo walking into the kitchen and making himself breakfast, his parents arriving home arguing and the exterior shots of Milo on the trampoline. The camera was used for its slow motion throughout the trampoline shots also, these look similar to the Billy Elliot shot of him bouncing up and down making it look very effective. Milo so far has been fantastic, it has been easy to film with him acting very seriously first time. So far I have paid Milo £10 for his acting skills and part throughout our film.

The last scene we have to shoot now is our sequence involving Milo running to a tree and climbing up it, this scene is very important as it enhances the point that Milo has no one to spend his time with and is completely alone in life. One important shot we will focus on is our 17 second shot of Milo running across the countryside. So far filming has gone well and editing is slowly getting there.