PRODUCTION DAY 1
As with all films, the first day was stressful and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. The first few hours definitely turned me into some kind of stressed out diva. Luckily everyone could put up with that.
Upon arriving at the location we discovered that, as we had feared, they had remodelled the office by knocking down some walls. Luckily this didn't affect us too much, in fact it worked more in our favour as we now had more space to shoot scenes 7, 8, & 9. I had to adjust the blocking slightly to accommodate this new space, but it wasn't anything too major. I feel it actually worked better.
My main focus after solving this initial issue was to dress the office location. I had created some posters to stick up on the walls, and I had very specific ideas as to where I want them to all go. There were some areas were we had to stick posters up to cover up details of the company who own the office location. All our other crew focused on blacking out the windows and dressing the storage room location.
Once the office and storage room sets were dressed, our actors arrived. My main focus after they had settled in was to run them through the scenes we were going to be shooting. I ran the blocking change past them to ensure it didn't throw up any problems. We then sat down and went through any script changes and any other important information.
Our first scene that day was scene 6 that takes place in storage room. It was very cold in the room, so in between shot set ups we ensured that was a warm room for our actors to sit in. As soon as we began shooting the camera began to play up. Batteries were not lasting very long, and we believe this was due to the cold conditions. During the downtimes I used my time wisely and went through notes with the actors. This technical issue also gave me more time to run through blocking with the actors, placing marks down on the floor as we went along.
Once all the technical issues were resolved, we worked our way through the scene. I decided that we'd shoot all the wide shoots first whilst we were establishing timings for all the actions. I followed this process for every scene. We then shot all of the close ups and additional coverage.
Directing wise, I think scene 6 will be the weakest scene as it was the first scene I directed, and prior to it I hadn't directed anyone for over a year. We will probably have to do some work in the edit to improve this scene.
After a dinner break, we moved upstairs to shoot the first half of scene 7. We can't film the second half until our shoot day next week because Craig who is playing Frank is not available for our first rescheduled shoot weekend.
I started by running the cast through the new blocking. We then rehearsed it a few times, and Ellen filmed someone of the rehearsals in case we needed the footage for the film. As with before we started by shooting all of the wide shots first, and then we followed with the close ups and any additional coverage.
Once we were happy with all of the footage for this scene we wrapped for the day as it was getting quite late. We were still on schedule though. Overall I feel the day went quite well. I don't think I was prepared enough at the start. I could've directed scene 6 better. I let the stress get to me too much, and I think this will be obvious in the edit.
Below are some photos from production day 1:
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