Production

FMP

PRODUCTION LOG

To ensure I was prepared for production, in February I put together a calendar/diary organizing when we will be filming and at what locations. I could then use this a base to arrange dates with cast/crew and even locations.

EQUIPMENT

We will be using a wide range of equipment and technology in this film. I have a contact who has been very kind to lend us her camera and sound equipment over the month of April. The camera, SONY A6000, with a 105mm lens is an amazing piece of kit, which Tommy and myself are familiar with as we used it for the summer project last year. It allows us to use great amounts of depth in our shots, which we have prepared for in our story board.

Original Idea

My original plan, was to hire out equipment from Limitless Academy, as they have the top-of-line gear, and I had the connection to them. But as that relationship was clearly established in the early stages of the project, I knew we couldn't them. CADS are a theater organisation, known for producing stage plays/musical/pantomimes etc. with nothing to do with film; which meant that they didn't have the largest access to the filming equipment Tommy and I desired to use. We ruled out using the college equipment quite early on, as we believed the equipment wasn't at a good enough quality for a production such as this.

Gimbal

As I mentioned previously, the gimbal was lent to us by a photographer off of Facebook, who allowed us to use his rig for the month of April. This was a great blessing for this project, however, it restricted us from being able to test shots we wanted with the gimbal prior to filming, and also possible reshoots in the month of the May.

CADS's Sound Equipment

Finding sound equipment was quite simple, but getting it to work was a major problem. CADS own four directional RODE microphones, which was a perfect source for recording dialogue and general ambiance. We got our hands on two of them and a couple of XLR cables to plug into the recording box (which was lent to us by the retired videographer along with the camera.) So, in theory we had the equipment ready for sound. I decided to test the mics before filming as was told that one of the four mics may record 'static' and nothing else. So I tested each mic and found that all of them had this horrible static noise interfering with the recorded audio; you could barely make out what was being said. This worried me quite a lot, as all of the mics were seemingly acting up. I theorized, that if only one of the mics was supposedly broken, and if the 'static interference' was coming through each of them in a similar way, it probably didn't have anything to do with the mics; rather, something else. To test this, I replaced the XLR, which I was feeding into both mics, with a newer XLR cable that I owned. This was where I learnt that the XLR cable was interfering with the audio; it was quite old and must've had a faulty jack when connecting into the recorder box. Thankfully, I had a replacement and switched it before principle photography began.

I'm glad I did this test with the audio equipment, if I hadn't, the problem would've gone unfixed and we wouldn't have been able to adapt to the problem on the day as we probably wouldn't have brought a spare XLR. This experience proved to me the importance of testing all my equipment before principle photography. After this test, I then did the same for all my other equipment to ensure it was all in working condition. In future projects, I will facilitate these tests into my production schedule, that way, all the equipment would be proven to work before the first day of filming.

WEEK 0/1

PLAN

FRIDAY - Meeting with Emma and Joe, final thoughts, preparations. Teach Joe the Zoom corder. Confirm dates.

Also confirm stunt double for Noah.

SATURDAY - Film on the heath with Patrick, Jim, Noah, stunt double, Lorely, Tommy, Emma, Joe and myself. Film from 9am to 2pm. Weather looks awkward but doable: Sun, partly cloudy, no rain, high speed winds. We will have to try and dodge the sun coming in and out. My main concern is the wind speeds, the dead cat should help toward that and mute a lot of the problems that could bring.

MONDAY - Buy new Zoom h4n PRO. Rename footage and sync, create PremPro file for Mascot and test 2:1 for Saturday footage.

TUESDAY - Prep for filming, confirm times, costumes, props etc. Go through Wix and organize the production tab.

WEDNESDAY - Film at the Daintrey's house. Prep before hand to test framing, lighting etc. Film with Jim and Noah from 6pm to 9pm. Emma and Joe on sound, find someone for AD.

THURSDAY - Edit Wix - production tab. Create google drive and share footage with Tommy. Get started on editing Wednesday's footage. Pack down from Emma and Joe's, ready for Sunday.

FRIDAY - Prep for Sunday (Hospital). Props, costume, equipment etc. Continue tasks from Thursday's list.

SATURDAY - Break and final Sunday filming checks.

PRODUCTION LOG + REFLECTION - WEEK 1

WK1 Friday was a simple day. I had a meeting with Joe and Emma breaking down their roles and prepping them for the next few weeks in audio and 1st AD. I described what a typical filming day would look like for this shoot and they seemed to understand pretty quickly. We mainly covered filming dates, and how things have moved around so much. Because of Jim's wife, there has been risk that rehearsals and filming will have needed to be moved and around and/or pushed back in April. We covered this and created backup filming dates, which the three of us were happy with and were available for. Annoyingly, I didn't bring my notebook with me to this meeting, and I really wish I did. Without my notebook, I came away from the meeting having nothing written down, some of the important times and dates had already slipped my mind. Thankfully Emma and Joe had written everything down, but I still felt a little oblivious to the fallback options. The meeting was a still a positive success as Emma and Joe became ready to film because of this meeting, they said they learnt a lot and knew what to expect. And even though I hadn't noted down what we said, I was still aware that we had alternatives, I just wasn't the person to go to to tell you what those alternatives were! In future, I should take notes at every meeting, even if they don't seem to crucial. Having everything noted down is the best way to lead the project, that way you rarely miss information and you can control your team more efficiently.

The reason why this was a problem became apparent later. When Jim's wife's condition became worse, Jim and the rest of the cast was asking me for backup dates, which I wasn't prepared for. I ended up (slightly chaotically) throwing out dates, on the group chat, and it got quite confusing for everyone in the team. If I had noted everything down, I could've, in advance, settled alternative dates, avoiding panic and confusion among the team. I now know the importance of documenting every meeting, even if it may just be a catch up or coaching session with the team. I found that 'note taking' also applied to cast rehearsals, whilst I recorded some of the adult rehearsals, I didn't record any of them involving Noah. In those instances, I should've written down my notes so that I remembered my direction and any external changes we made that didn't involve the script. If I did this, directing the rehearsed scenes on the day would have felt more coherent with the actors; instead of contradicting myself from previous rehearsals (giving two opposing notes for the same scene at different times).

From all of this, I've definitely learnt the value of note taking. With every project I do now, I will definitely be taking notes, production logs, reflection etc. wherever I go. I'll buy a new notebook for each project and write everything down from every meeting and rehearsal. That way, I will ensure my direction is clear and consistent, and my cast/crew feel clearly led and avoid confusion.

WK1 Saturday has been highly anticipated and I felt prepared leading into it. This whole week I’ve been managing technical preparations, rehearsals; I was so stressed out by the first day of production that I forced myself to ensure everything was set so I couldn’t make any mistakes.

Audio Trouble

I started the week testing the audio kit, we managed to use all of CADS’s equipment in relation to audio bar the Zoom recorder box. This, we borrowed from the person who is also lending us a camera (whom I got into contact with thanks to Tommy and mine’s previous film making project, Will Man). I begun by testing each mic supplied to us, to assess which had the better quality. I tested in doors and outdoors to also test the functionality of the dead cat (which worked well). But when listening back to the audio, the recording was incredibly crackly and it was unusable. This gave me my first concern for the week. I was worried that the source of the problem was either the mic’s or, worse, the Zoom box. But I figured that the XLR cable I was using to connect the two may have been the issue having noticed that it was an old one that had been sat in Emma and Joe’s cupboard for a few years. So, I tried a new XLR cable and everything sounded good; I found that the XLR cable that I was originally using had faulty connector pins as one of them was loose. Thanks to this test, we knew to change the cable and we were officially ready for Saturday.

The RRC Collaboration

Then, I finalized the agreements with the RRC on the Tuesday. I organised a meeting with Jamie Green (the coach of the club), where we discussed dates for filming with the team, as well as us using props and kits from their own facilities. Jamie was more than happy to let us use everything in the cupboard, and told me that he would see who of the team are interested in filming with us. However, since Royston have been surprisingly successful in tournaments this year, they can’t simply allow us to commandeer one of their practice sessions. We’d need to book one of their free evenings to make this work. At first, I was against this suggestion since the scene in mind is set early morning, but I will have to compromise if we want to use the team at all. Tommy and I will discuss how we will get the scene to appear like or morning, or even decide to change the time of day within the film.

Jamie also gave us full permission to use props and kits whenever we need to, we just need to let him know a day before filming so we can organise to collect the unit’s keys from him at his work (just round the corner). This is highly encouraging, it makes filming on the Heath incredibly easy as we don’t need to worry about having the right amount of props or kits available to us.

Last Rehearsal

I have been concerned for Jim for a few weeks now as his wife had been hospitalized for a prolonged period of time. He and his son have had to cancel on meetings and rehearsals recently because of this. I was worried that they were going to have to step away from the project, if they had there would’ve been nothing I could do to recast or save this project. This has been another source of stress for me over the past two weeks. But I stayed in constant communication with Jim to ensure that no pressure was on him or his family. I wanted him to feel that there was no pressure on him to commit to this project as his family is far more important.

On Thursday, I asked if Jim and Alison would be up for a quiet, steady rehearsal, where we’d talk through the filming process and settle any nerves. Jim agreed to this meeting, which went ahead that night.

I’m so glad we did this rehearsal. With filming only a few days away, I could Jim and Alison were quite nervous, myself included. But I used this time to break down what a traditional filming day would like and answer any of their questions. Alison spoke to me after the meeting saying that she appreciated this evening to welcome them both gently into the project, she said she came away feeling ready for the coming weeks, which was exactly my intention for the rehearsal. Jim said the same, he found that it helped keep his mind occupied during this hard time for him. Overall, this rehearsal was a success and it allowed the actors to feel prepared for the coming weeks and settle nerves.

Body Double

After casting Jim’s son as the actor for Noah I was incredibly excited, I could see he had a lot of talent and was anticipating working with a child actor for the first time. However, I was told by Jim that he hasn’t played rugby before. In the script, Noah is a prodigy at scoring conversions (having been stuck doing them all his life), this is not the case for Jim’s son. This meant that I needed to find a body double to get the shots I needed showing off Noah being a good kicker. I needed a child who can play rugby, has a similar figure to Jim’s son, and wouldn’t mind being shown on camera. Now, finding an eight year old who is a natural kicker felt quite impossible. So I decided to age up the specification as the subject would already need to be quite far from the camera to be noticed.

Coincidentally, my cousins were staying with us this weekend. One of them, male, eleven years, and thankfully, massively into rugby was exactly who I needed for the part. I asked his parents if they were okay with him doubling for Jim’s son and they agreed. From this, we now had a stunt double for a day of filming on the Saturday. A positive solution.

Saturday – Day 1

So, today has been a highly anticipated day and I felt ready going into it. I started the day at 6.30am; getting all of my equipment together and ready to leave the house. I made a checklist of To Do’s before we began filming:

Station Tommy to stabilise the Gimbal
Coach Joe with the Tascam
Collect the key from Jamie
Find a kit and props from the RRC unit.
Brief the team at 9am on location.

I managed to check everything off the list but three problems came up. Big ones. Firstly, the wind was high, and we were filming outside in an open space; my last FMP was ruined by poor audio quality (thanks to the wind), however, I had prepared for this issue and supplied a decent dead cat, so in a way, my nerves were relatively calmed. Secondly, when Tommy was calibrating the gimbal, he found that once he turned it on the gimbal shake then turn itself off. No matter how many times he tried to recalibrate, the gimbal would through this same process. This concerned me greatly as we had a few shots planned with the gimbal for today. Eventually, Tommy couldn’t find any solutions so we put it down and had to resort to a hand held grip for the gimbal shots. This led to the wide shots being quite unstable and shaky, not the desired effect I’d hoped for. Hopefully, in post we can find way to stabilise the footage, but I’m worried that that will lower the resolution of the picture. We couldn’t find a work around for this problem on the day, which led to us having to compromise using this slightly inconvenient process. Having just looked online for answers to this problem, I’m yet to find any fix for the gimbal. I’ve just found a promising YouTube tutorial: CHICVOYAGE’s Ronin RS Vibrating Fix so will need to test this before Wednesday (the next filming day). Looking back, I should’ve tested the gimbal with our camera before production started, that way I would’ve know this was an issue and could’ve found a solution before filming, therefore allowing us to get the shots we wanted. I didn’t do this because Tommy was in possession of the camera and I was in possession of the gimbal, so they couldn’t be tested. Next time, we need to test every rig before we use it. In hindsight, the reason why we didn’t feel the need to test the gimbal was because we tested our camera on the college’s Ronin RS3, so we assumed it would have worked on our own. This wasn’t the case. I now know to test every rig that we will end up using before filming begins, even two of the same model as their settings may differ from each other. More updates to come from this issue – to hopefully find a fix.

The third problem: Once we agreed to go without the gimbal, I just needed to teach Joe and Emma how to use the Tascam box. However, even though we had tested this equipment before and it was fully functional, to our surprise, the box malfunctioned and shut off. At first, we thought the batteries had run out; I had prepared for this however, and brought spares. But, even after we changed the batteries, the box wouldn’t turn on. We tried everything: switching SD cards, even more batteries, different power source, but we couldn’t do anything to turn the box on. This meant that we couldn’t record audio through this box, which meant that we couldn’t use the boom mic, and had no current way to capture dialogue.

At this moment, I was prepared to call the day off as there was no point in getting footage without dialogue. The day was already incredibly windy so if we wanted a replacement device, such as a phone, the quality would be so bad, that there wouldn’t be much point in using it anyway. I didn’t know what do at this point. However, everyone in the team had prepared for this day, and we’d already come so far, so I decided to continue with the day without worrying about getting audio at first.

I decided to move onto getting shots that didn’t, necessarily, need perfect audio and could be covered by Foley design. The stunt double shots. We spent around 2 hours getting the shots of the body double on the rugby pitch and they went really well, with everyone doing a terrific job. This part of the day helped me forget that we were missing audio for the later scenes. Once we’d finished with filming the body double, we moved the Heath bench, overlooking the pitch, to film the dialogue scene. I wanted to go ahead with filming this scene without audio anyway as I wanted to show the actors and the crew what filming a traditional scene would look like, even though all the footage we get will have to be reshot anyway. The team were thankful for this decision and took a bit of pressure off of everyone else. When taking a short break to set up the scene, we found a small shotgun mic, which came with the camera. Whilst this was a source of recording audio here, it wasn’t enough to get the quality we needed as the camera would be too far away from the actors to capture what they were saying in good detail. But we went with this small ‘fix’ anyway. My dad came up with a good idea to place a phone, recording audio, next to the actors on the bench; since the device is small, it wouldn’t be noticed on the camera, and it is another way to record audio, which we could use as a last resort. I decided to go ahead with this idea as it was better than no audio, in that way we have fall back on if we can’t manage to reshoot.

This part of the day was good for the actors, they started to settle into their rolls and got used to being on camera and listening to my direction. Having looked over the footage and the audio, we will probably have to reshoot the entire scene again, but I’m still glad we did today and went ahead with filming the scene; Emma and Joe said to me as we were leaving the pitch at 2 ‘We’re glad that we did today, it gave us a taste of what the next few weeks will look like.’

I’ve learnt a lot today. Despite having low quality audio, the actors and crew have come away feeling positive and ready for the coming weeks, this is still good for the project. I’m glad the Tascam box died on the first day rather than a few days into production, now we can get another box and continue filming without worrying about audio problems. There was nothing I could do to know the box would break, but I should’ve backed it up regardless. I now want to back up every piece of equipment I have, even if I think it’s in complete working condition now. We could’ve captured the audio we wanted if I’d prepared for such an event. Maybe if I’d found a back up box from CADS, or tested using my phone as a legitimate source, then we would’ve been more prepared for this. But we will adapt from this and go forward with a new recording box, which I will purchase, and then have back ups for the now: audio (phone), camera/lens (Tommy’s personal), lights (CADS and my own). Early in my project, I should’ve made an assessment on possible conflicts with equipment and they may go wrong and how I would avoid them; if I had done this then I this then wouldn’t need to reshoot. Going forward, when doing a project like this, I will make a list of every possible problem with equipment that could come up and find a way to insure it to avoid losing valuable time.

Overall, I’m confident after today, I think I handled the problems well and I’m excited for the next filming day (Wednesday). After reviewing the footage, I’m not too happy with how the scene turned out and I’m slightly disappointed with my direction. Now that I know we will probably have to reshoot, I can learn from my directoral mistakes and improve the scene from there. The problem that I found with my directing, was that I gave my actors too much of a rigid ideology of the scene. I told Nick that I only want his focus to be on Noah, and Coach on himself; this didn’t allow for the characters to gel as much as I’d liked so the scene ends up feeling unwanted by the characters. To change this, in the reshoot I’ll tell the actors to feel free to push harder for their goals in this scene, and not be afraid to look away from their core focus and occasionally help each other out; I think this will allow for the conversation to feel more necessary rather than a waste of time for both the characters and the audience.

I struggled to direct Noah as well, between takes I’d talk to him about what I’d like him to do for the shot in detail, he’d agree and say he’s ready but then he’d continue to do the same thing as he did previously. This happened with every shot we did with him; there was barely any variation in his performance. I had to be patient and settle with what we got as I couldn’t find a way to get anything else with him. He had his own way of doing the scene, and I couldn’t influence that in any way today. This has generally been quite dampening on my confidence in directing; being unable to efficiently direct the leading character is troubling. I need to find a solution to this problem soon, but as of now, I don’t feel very close to one.

WK1 Monday served to be a chilled, more relaxed day. I only tasked myself with purchasing and testing a new Zoom recorder box. In the morning, I contacted Emily (my contact, who lent me the box) to inform her that the box wouldn't switch on despite different methods of trial. I asked if it had done something like this before, it hadn't; she assumed that the box (being 15 years old) had had its time and there was nothing we could do. She tried chasing her insurance provider for the box but that led to a dead end; she apologized and left it at that.

This left me with no audio and limited leads, either: purchase a new Zoom box, which could near up to £200 for the quality we're looking for. Or, continue using the phone and the shotgun mic in tandem, which would greatly reduce the audio quality for the film, so, it's not ideal. I ended up purchasing a new zoom box, the h4n PRO, as I believe it outweighed the other option for multiple reasons: Firstly, it allows us to use the equipment we've spent the past few weeks testing and obtaining therefore not letting them go to waste. Secondly, I found a good deal on the h4n PRO at the time, which was a naturally good incentive. Thirdly, since Emily has technically lost her sound recording box, I offered it as a thank you to her for allowing us to use her camera and other various equipment, this way, she (and possibly myself) can use it for future projects.

Once the box had arrived, I tested it with appropriate equipment, and it worked perfectly without any problems. Although, the manual was slightly tricky to understand, I managed to set it up in about an hour. The only downside to this product from what I've seen, is that the boot up sequence takes far too long (roughly 1-2 minutes), this has the potential to waste time on set. To avoid this problem, we will probably have to leave the box on through the filming day, changing batteries whenever needed, so that we can run efficiently between takes. The downside to this solution is that we will run through batteries quite quickly, so I will bring extra batteries and a double AA battery charger with me to set to avoid this problem if it arises.

WK1 Wednesday felt longer compared to the last day we filmed. Sitting here now, after the day is done, I’m so much more tired compared to how I was at the end of Saturday.

Tommy and I began the day bringing all of the equipment to Joe and Emma’s house at 2pm; the actors were scheduled to arrive at 6pm, which gave us 4 hours to prepare and test anything beforehand. We started by going through different lighting setups which we could use internally; I wanted to do this so that we didn’t feel rushed when we started shooting. Since we were filming Noah until, the latest, 9pm, that only gave us around 3 hours to get roughly 12 shots. I understood that when setting up for a new shot, lights can be improvised and things will need to adapt to fit the shot I’m looking for. Because of this, we prepared and framed/lit a few shots before the actors arrived; this way, we had more preparedness leading into the shoot therefore not wasting as much time getting the shots we need within the 3 hour window. This strategy helped and I’m glad we did this.

At 18:00 the crew was ready at the house with the first shot already set up but the actors (Jim and Noah) were nowhere to be seen. Jim messaged at 18:03 saying he'd just got in from work and would be slightly late. This concerned me quite a bit as we already had a short enough window of 3 hours that evening. Eventually, Jim and Noah arrived at 18:40 with some troubling news. Jim's wife had been incredibly unwell again, therefore causing them to be late, and forcing them to leave early. Jim also expressed how he may not even be able to do the Thursday evening shoot (the following day) as he needs to look after his family. Jim was noticeably low for this shoot, so I chose in that moment to not commit to the 12 shot schedule, but rather pace the evening comfortably for everyone involved. I did this so that Jim felt no pressure to commit, and also to give Noah some more room to act in front the camera without the pressure of making mistakes. This decision helped me slow down in my directing and allowed us to move through the evening gradually.

I didn't want to put any pressure on Jim as he was having a rough evening so I decided to prioritize all of Noah's shots on the staircase (scenes 21,23 and 25). This did involve Jim but not as heavily, which I think helped him settle into the shoot. Noah did a terrific job from Take One and I took this opportunity to develop my directing skills with Noah, as I struggled to do so on Saturday.

Thankfully, I made a breakthrough. I discovered that Noah has his own idea of every scene in his mind, and he will act it out as he sees fit. In order to get him to change this pre-conceptualized scenario, I needed to give him a direct action to replace what he was originally doing. For example, the scene where Noah crawls to the top of the stairs and calls for Nick to help, is the climax of the film; it's arguably the most critical part of the film so it heavily relies on strict, carefully placed emotional beats. Noah is eight years old, so instructing him to allow for an emotional beat doesn't make sense in his mind; instead, I give him something to do when I need there to be a beat. In the scene I just described, when Noah reaches the top of the stairs, he needs to take minute to feel defeated; to achieve the beat, I directed Noah to paint a shape with his hands on the carpet. In reality this doesn't work, but in the shot, all we see is Noah taking his time to sit at the top of stairs, therefore, creating an emotional beat. This worked brilliantly, and the shot turned really well. After moving on from this shot, I was more thankful to have found a way to direct Noah, quite early on in the process; this gave me a lot of confidence.

Unfortunately, Jim and Noah had to leave early, so we cut the shoot short at 20:15. We only managed to capture half of what we wanted, but what we got - was very good. I was also informed by Jim the following morning (Thursday) that he and Noah wouldn't be able to make it to the Thursday shoot that day as his wife had got severely worse over night. This worried me a lot as we were already generally behind on the scheduling, as we had to cut the shoot short the previous day. From here, I started to reschedule, with the other actors involved, for another evening the following week.

I learnt many good things today, I made a breakthrough in my directing with Noah, which has given me a good amount of confidence moving forward with project. I feel I was as prepared as I could've been for today's shoot, having come in early to set everything up, practiced shots before hand, testing equipment before the shoot. I couldn't have predicted Jim's situation and I am trying my best to support him in this difficult time. At this project's current status: we've come away from every shoot needed to schedule another date to get what we need. This isn't good. The next filming day is Sunday at the hospital, which we can't return to, so we need to be extra efficient on this day. Because of how behind we have been today and Saturday, I'm putting more of my attention on ensuring we get everything we need for Sunday. I'm doing this by: double-confirming all cast members bring costumes and props that they require; keeping all of the necessary equipment in one place under a checklist, rather than being scattered between multiple members of the crew; and making sure everybody is familiar with their role and knows exactly what they need to do for the day before they get there.

To fix the gimbal issue I took to YouTube as the Ronin RS3 forums weren't very helpful. The video was very simple and clear, in fact, it was a video of the guy figuring the same problem on the fly. I discovered that the gimbal we were using wasn't calibrated to the weight of the SONY A6000. The solution: a matter of automatically recalibrating gimbal's tilt/pan/roll settings. I imagine the owner of this gimbal we're using has a heavier camera so the settings weren't used to a lighter camera.

Overall, this tutorial helped me find a quick fix, and now the gimbal is completely operational and available for us to use for the rest of the shoot.

Despite audio being non-functional for the day, Joe and Emma stayed around for the whole day to still practice what it would be like to record audio via the boom. For each take, Joe wanted to stand with the boom mic as practice. I liked this idea as it allowed him to practice finding his mark on the frame (so we don't see the mic in the shot), and gave him good, long experience on what it's like to keep the boom in the air for so many hours of the day!

WEEK 2

PLAN

SUNDAY - Hospital shoot. All cast and crew are called. Crew from 8:30-18:00. Cast from 9:30-17:30.

MONDAY - Filming at the Daintrey's house - pickup from Thursday. Jim, Alison and Noah called. All crew called. Crew 15:00 -21:00. Cast 18:00-21:00.

TUESDAY - Sort through footage from previous two days. Write-up on Wix. Edit Hospital sequences.

WEDNESDAY - Go into college - book props for Saturday at the heath. Return home to edit, and continue Wix changes.

THURSDAY - Continue editing hospital sequences (aim to get those complete), continue Wix changes.

FRIDAY - Prep for Saturday (The Heath). Arrange Extras timings and scheduling. Props and equipment readied.

SATURDAY - Rugby field major shoot. All cast and all crew called from 9:30-16:00.

WK2 Sunday has been the best day since production started. It was a brilliant day today, every part of it was productive, actors were on their game, the crew were efficient, I couldn't be more pleased with how today went. Even with the success of today, there were a few problems and challenges that I needed to overcome.

The day started at 8:30, where we got to the hospital and unlocked the site to start bring our equipment in. We (myself, Emma and dad) then spent the next hour moving things around to fit the set I wanted. We were prepping for the Doctor's office, which we had planned to film later in the day, but I wanted to get everything set up now before the actors got here so that we wouldn't waste time while the actors were with us. The office was practically empty when we arrived, which meant we needed to dress the room with our own props and accessories to really bring the room to life. But before we started dressing the office, we decided it would be a good idea to take pictures of the room and everything in its place to ensure that everything returned to its original position in the room after we'd finished using it. If things were moved, or we accidentally took something that wasn't ours, we probably would've gotten into trouble with the site team. So for the upmost safety and precaution, we took these pictures before we did anything to the site. This ended up being very helpful. At the end of the day we used these pictures as reference to know where everything goes e.g. posters, desks, wires etc.

Before Dressing

After Dressing

I'd like to credit the props team for their incredible work this day. We managed to find and create numerous props to ensure accuracy for the time period and setting. We decided: the more detail, the better, and it did pay off on the day. The actors made a comment on how it made their jobs easier to act and feel a part of this world. Dr. Woodlet, for example; had Noah's X-Ray results documented and filed, he had his lanyard with NHS ID and confirmation, a scheduled timetable of appointments and many other details, which David (actor) said helped him get acclimatized to his office and play the part with that extra detail. I'm glad we covered this in the props and costumes department, as it allowed for the actors to settle into their characters and enable an easier acting experience allowing it to feel more authentic.

Noah's Hip X-Ray

The actors arrived just before 9:30 to get into costume and ready themselves for for the first scene. We started slightly later than planned as I didn't anticipate deciding on which costumes to wear for each scene. I ended up going through, with the actors, each costume and preparing which ones work best together. Whilst this decision making process did run over into the schedule, it was a good thing to do as it prepared us for each scene allowing for quicker change-overs.

On Saturday, I had made a shot plan to have a rough timetable to follow throughout the day; this helped me have an understanding of time for the day and to know roughly when to move on if we ever went over schedule. We managed to stick to the schedule well and everything was moving on with a good pace. The first problem we ran into, was when we change-over to SC7 and began filming the first shot. When we started recording with the camera it would randomly change modes and stop recording mid-take, we didn't know what was causing this as it would just do it on its own with any prompt. This interfered with a few of the takes in this scene. We tried turning the camera on and off again, which didn't work and then tried using a different battery, which did work. We steered clear of that battery for the rest of the shoot but that meant we needed to be more sparing with the cameras usage as we were one battery down for the rest of the day. We kept on top of a cycle: as soon as one battery depletes, stick it on charge and replace with highest charged battery (of three). We didn't end up running out of batteries but we did come close. Thankfully, prior to any principle photography, Tommy and I bought two new batteries for the camera thinking something like this may happen (a dead battery or faulty system), I'm glad we prepared for this as we barely had enough for today. For the future shoots, I'll look into fixing this faulty battery and see why it's causing the camera to change modes.

Thankfully, that was one of the only technical problems we faced today, the rest were purely director related. I believe the low number of technical problems is due to the fact that we encountered so many in the first two days of filming that we have found solutions to avoid further problems. Even though we ran into less of these issues today, I will remain prepared for the rest of the shoot.

Whilst I haven't struggled with directing today as much as I have done with other days, this shoot did come with a few challenges. The most glaring issue for me today was when directing Noah, I did discover how to direct Noah on the Wednesday shoot but today he was harder to work with. The problem: He couldn't sit still all day, he had to be doing something. When on camera he was acting rather strangely, looking up and down, left and right, his eyes darting everywhere, and his arms were quite sporadic. Talking to Jim about the problem between takes helped me learn why: He was bored. I understood, he is eight years old so naturally a 9 hour shoot could be quite boring for him. Ironically, in the scene Noah is supposed to be bored, but I want that to come through in his stillness, not his energy. While filming SC7 I came up with a solution to the problem. Since he was so full of energy I needed to find a way to let that energy be channeled elsewhere and not in the scene. So I told Noah that between takes I'd like him to do two laps of the hospital corridor, while in crutches, as fast as his can. He was quite excited by this idea and agreed (along with his dad's permission). It worked quite well; once I yelled cut he jumped up and did a few laps of the corridor letting his energy out. When he returned to the scene, he was a lot calmer and used the scene as a chance to rest, giving me the performance I was looking for. After a while, he grew tired of running laps and eventually stayed perfectly calm during each take, which was exactly what I needed. This is a technique that I'll keep in mind for the rest of the film, if Noah is acting up and needs to let energy out, I'll send him on a short run between takes; that way, I can direct different energies from Noah and still keep him engaged.

I also had another problem with Noah's actor: he kept looking at the camera. In most takes, he's looking at the camera; annoyingly, I don't spot it as much as should when we're filming, but when looking over the footage, it's quite obvious to me. I don't know how to avoid this problem yet, I couldn't find a fix on the day. I did keep reminding Noah that the number one rule in film-making is to never look at the camera; just before some takes I'd ask Noah what the number rule is, he'd respond 'Never look at the camera' and then - that take he wouldn't look at the camera, but then for all the others he would look right down the lens. It can be quite distracting at times so I need to find a way around it. It does limit the number of usable takes for the edit, which isn't helpful. If I remind him to not look at the camera before each take, he probably won't, but for now, I think it's just a matter of teaching him not to do it and eventually he'll learn.

As a director, I did accomplish quite a lot today. I feel I got the shots I wanted and the performances I needed for the film. However, there were some shots which didn't match what I was looking for and at times I didn't feel I was directing. Specifically, in SC27, we were filming a reaction shot, and someone from the team went over to the actors between a take and gave them some notes. I heard them saying: 'I think you should try it stunned for the next take.' This is a problem for two reasons. Firstly, the note itself wasn't beneficial to the scene so was unnecessary, this, thereby, confused the actors and produced a performance that I did't want for the scene. Secondly, it shows a disconnect between myself and my team, this person shouldn't have said what they said without having spoken to me about it first. I really appreciate new ideas and suggestions from others, but they need to go through me and not go unfiltered; if they do, then the scene may not go the way I need it to and do more harm than good. As the director, it's my role to understand what we're filming form a larger scale, the notes I give are influenced with the rest of the film in mind, I don't know where these other notes are coming from so they may be quite harmful to the final product. The fact that this scenario happened multiple times today is proof that this knowledge isn't solidified in my team. We needed to do double the takes because of this incident for SC27, because I needed to work around this note that was given; not only that, but my actors were confused by the different notes being given to them, they didn't understand how I wanted them to actually do the scene because the two notes conflicted. Overall, I felt slightly out of control at times because it was as if there were multiple directors walking around on set. There was even a conflict with Tommy in SC7 - S6, where he was convinced that the shot needed to be taken on a certain side of the actors because we'd flipped the rest of the scene. I understood what he was saying but this shot didn't need to be flipped because if it did we'd miss the reaction from Emma. But Tommy insisted and set the shot up regardless. In the end, we did miss the reaction and now we haven't got a reaction from Emma for that scene. If I had been more direct and strict with my reason then we could've avoided this, but instead I let someone else direct and it came at a cost for the film. In future, I need be confident in my reasoning and be more decisive and be in control of the project. I will talk to the technical team before the next filming date and talk about this issue to avoid it on future filming days.

Upon reflection, I feel that today went far better than I could've hoped for. I haven't properly reviewed the footage yet so I will assess today's success tomorrow but having come away from the day feeling positively happy, I'm confident we have some really good footage. Unfortunately, something came up for Jim and his family for Monday (tomorrow), which means we won't be able to film any pick-ups at the Daintrey's house. We did manage to organize two dates at the end of April, which everyone can do. But it still isn't ideal that we keep pushing these dates back; I imagine it will put a lot more pressure on the final few weeks of this project, but I'm prepared for this by: editing all the footage prior to the last week of filming, so the film is at a working stage despite being so close to the due date. We've already filled out the majority of the presentation tabs in our projects, which allows us to give our full attention to the edit, once we've got the all the footage. Overall, we'd prepared for small set backs like these so they aren't as damaging as they could've been.

I did encounter some small problems today but as a whole, the day went really well and we have a lot to show for it. The day did finish with some good news: we may be able to come back to the hospital this weekend to reshoot anything we may have missed. Or, better yet, we could film in a brand new office and get the coach's interior workspace done. Emma (producer) has reapplied the NHS property application allowing us to possibly film for an afternoon next Sunday. If we have to reshoot anything from today's filming, we can use that day; but I'd mainly like to use this Sunday as a chance to film the coach's office as we haven't found a location for that scene until today. On that note, today has been positive and it has lifted my confidence in this project as we get a quarter of the way through filming. As the next filming day has been moved to Saturday, that gives me a whole working week to go over footage, edit sequences, write-up on Wix, return to college and make more progress on my FMP. I'm choosing to see Monday's cancellation as a benefit to correct the pacing of this project, since I have been feeling slightly overwhelmed recently by the amount of rescheduling.

WK2 Monday I got started with editing the hospital sequences. I came away from yesterday quite tired as it was a full 9 hour shoot, I hadn't really had the chance to sit down until the evening, where I did some reflection on the day. I needed to get started on editing the hospital sequences since I know how time consuming it can be (because of how particular I am). I decided not to give myself strict times and periods I need to finish by, rather, I gave myself simple tasks that were easy to digest bit by bit. I did this to ease my tiredness, I didn't want to give myself long working hours and deadline as this would only stress me out further and not give me rest I need. Whilst I value rest, you can still work - restfully; by not putting too much pressure on yourself, you can still achieve a successful working day.

I began by sifting through the footage and audio files, renaming them, filing them, and backing them up on my laptop. This is a time consuming process, which can take up to two hours depending on how long the day was. Once I'd finished, Tommy called, and asked if he could come over to pick up the SD cards as the google drive didn't have any of the previous footage available to him. This confused me as I thought it was fine, but after checking, I found that the files from Wednesdays shoot (at the Daintrey's) had only upload two of the videos and showed this message: '451 hours remaining on upload'. There was clearly a problem as I started the upload on the Thursday following filming. Clearly, the files were too big and google drive couldn't handle the amount of GB being shared. I ended up cancelling the upload and telling Tommy what had happened, and what problems this causes.

The google drive incident now left us with no way of sharing the footage between ourselves. We discussed how we'd have to manually share the SD cards and download the footage on different days. This wasn't so much of a problem until Tommy called again, later in the day, to tell me that he couldn't see the footage on the SD cards, as if they were all erased. This was major concern, all of the footage from previous days, including the hospital, had all been mysteriously erased without prompt. The relief: I had backed up all of the footage on my laptop, and to the cloud, which was in good condition. But Tommy clearly had no access to the files himself and couldn't find the problem. Eventually, Tommy got back to me saying how he tried viewing the SD card in multiple devices and found that it only worked on his old windows laptop. This is where we discovered that he couldn't access the SD files while using an Apply product or Sony product - the formats were different. This was a relief, as it told us that the SD card is actually in good condition and we just had the formats mixed up. Although, despite it not being a major problem, it's still not a good idea to constantly be moving the SD card in and out of different devices. I'd like to find another way to share the footage, to ensure that we don't lose any footage from the SD card. We could upload the files to a terabyte hard drive, which Tommy owns, that way the SD cards stay in good condition and we can access the files from there. This may come with other issues though; since we haven't tested it, I'm not so keen to go ahead with this right now.

But on my end, I had all the footage from all three current days, so booted up Premier Pro to begin editing the hospital sequences. It was my first time opening Premier Pro for the project, and I'd come up with a new system to be as efficient and safe as possible when using the software. I decided to edit each sequence in it's own premier pro file, rather than editing the entire film in one big file. That way, my laptop can manage each file without overheating or risk crashing. Then, I can export each sequence and bring them all together in one file where I can then complete a full colour grade in the final export. This system allows for me to work on my laptop efficiently, thereby allowing me to work from home outside of college hours (rather than being limited to work on the edit at college).

I started with editing SC3. A short, straight-forward scene, which only includes 4 shots. It is dialogue heavy but in the past I have preferred editing these types of scenes compared to visual focused scenes. As the writer of the film, editing the script comes easier to me, unlike how it may do with Tommy as he didn't write the script. Because of this, I will help Tommy edit the dialogue heavy scenes, at his request, so that he has the clearest understanding of the scene before attempting to edit it. This trope reverses for the visually reliant scenes; for example, when Tommy and I were editing our rugby test sequence, Tommy's skills shone, whereas I needed guidance from him. Naturally, we fit into our roles, this benefits the film - if we choose to work together to let our skills cooperate. As the director, I feel it's my responsibility to ensure this cooperation happens so to see the best version of our final product. I digress.

I began work on SC3, on my own, and got off to a good start. I was feeling confident after Sunday's success at the hospital, with everything turning out better than I had anticipated - I was glad to see all our preparations paying off. When I was editing this first scene in the Dr's office,I remembered my research on motivated cuts in editing, and that every cut should have a purpose that can add to the story, whether that's showing somebody talking or a reaction or an introduction to a new character etc. whatever it is, it needs to be motivated. Originally, I opened the scene with the insert of the X-Ray and then moved onto Woodlet, who was saying his line describing Perthe's Disease. When looking back over this scene, I didn't feel like we needed to see Woodlet say this line as what he's saying should speak for itself; my main focus for this line shouldn't be who's saying it but, rather, who's receiving it instead. So instead I cut to Noah (the person in whom the characters are discussing) and then immediately after, the parents, Emma and Nick, who are the ones taking all of this information in. In this scenario, the audience are in the same position as Nick and Em, and if they are to relate to these characters, we need to edit it as such: the audience are processing this new information at the same time our main characters are, allowing the audience to connect to them in this opening scene. Then, for the continuation of the scene, I continued to keep the focus on Nick and Emma for this very reason. I only cut to Woodlet when he says a line that carries importance e.g. "If he's in pain - listen to him." This was the line, that I told David (on Sunday [Hospital Shoot]), that was most important of his lines in this scene as it shows a genuine care and respect for this family, who are learning life altering news.

Strangely, this change massively altered the pacing of the scene. As the focus was taken off of the lines being said, and directed to Nick and Emma's reaction, the scene felt slower. When showing it to my dad, he said that he doesn't feel as obligated to take in the onslaught of information about the disease, rather, he can gather what's being said through the acting in Alison and Jim's performances. Because of this comment, I decided to keep these changes as a permanent addition to the scene. I'm also happy with this scene as it reflects my research on the Diana adaptations; I felt that factual context in this scene wasn't overbearing because of this change, and it felt natural, rather than forcefully formulaic. The characters were nicely set up and the scene fulfilled it's purpose in setting up context for the rest of the film. In my Diana research, I found a camera technique which I wanted to use for this scene. After discussing it with Tommy, he agreed that we were to do the zoom (push in on Nick) artificially in post production. I wasn't too sure how to do this on the day as we hadn't done the research on the effect prior. I may be able to add the effect on a later date but I don't think I'll have the time. This really annoyed me; if I had discussed, with Tommy, the effect I wanted sooner, we would've prepared for it in advance during the research phases. Because of this, this effect may go unused and I won't deliver on the full vision I originally intended for this scene. I don't feel that the Diana research was put to waste from this, as it did influence my editing choices as well - and the rest of my directing for this scene(alongside The Social Network analysis). But I still think that zoom research could've been put to better use if I had discussed with Tommy about this idea sooner. I need to communicate better with Tommy, in future, on the all the technical ideas I have, as he's the person that oversees its practical development. If I hadn't been so caught up in the production role, this would've been on my mind.

However, within SC3, I had a few issues with the way we filmed it. While in the editing suite, I have the opportunity to properly look over the footage in good detail - this is where I tend to over analyse. SC3 - S3 is a medium, two shot showing Nick and Emma in Woodlet's office. I had two problems with this shot when editing it.

Firstly, Nick has one line in the scene: "I'm sorry?" It's in response to Noah's diagnosis. On the day, I recall getting 7 takes of this shot as the line just wasn't landing. I directed the line as: disbelief, Nick isn't apologizing to Woodlet, nor is upset with Woodlet, he can't quite believe what he's hearing and that comes through in this line. When looking through every take, there isn't a single line which works for me as it doesn't capture that original direction. In fact, Jim's acting in this scene completely misses what I had in mind; he looks tired rather than shocked, bored rather focused, he never really looks at Woodlet during the shot and it limits how much I can do with it. My main question from this issue: How did I miss this on the day?

Secondly, the shot is far too tight and it's quite boring to look at. When putting in the 4:3 aspect ratios, I found that it made this specific shot feel far too tight. It was cutting off Jim and Alison's shoulders and it feels very limited to what we can see and what's going on. Unfortunately, there is no fix to this shot other than to add it to the list of shots which I would've liked to reshoot. Without the awkward framing, it also doesn't have a lot of depth or colour. The shot is supposed to look depressing but I believe that a 'boring' shot in film should actually look quite interesting: you shouldn't have to bore the audience to get a boring looking shot. A shot can arguably still look interesting but instead it stereotypically looks boring e.g. beige colours, squares, flat lighting, film grain.

These two problems leave me asking the same question: How did I let this slide on the day? This is my conclusion: SC3 - S3 was one of the last shots we got on the day. We started in the corridor and then did David's shots in the office, then finally did S3. I think I was quite tired when we got to this shot; I was drained, so were the actors, Tommy, the rest of the crew, which meant that this shot may have turned out rougher than we would've expected. We missed key framing details, and I missed a key directing note - all due to tiredness. Granted, I'm not used to long filming days, but I can't let this happen again. I can't let long days interfere with my directing and my keen eye for detail, if I do, the film loses quality. Because of lack of concentration in the final shot of the day, it didn't turn out great in almost every aspect: acting, framing, directing. The only quality that turned out well was the audio, taken by Joe and Emma, they are practiced semi-professionals who have worked in the business for many years, so they were naturally able to keep there energy high. Somehow, I need to find a way to keep my energy high for the rest of shooting days. There are more 9 hour days in the schedule to come and I have to be ready for them. Thanks to this observation now, I know what can come from this type of behavior. If I want this production to be as professional as I proposed it to be, I need to learn how to keep my mind switched on, and my energy going at full speed on the day. I could do this by ensuring healthy sleep patterns, healthy diet - this to keep up my energy levels naturally. Take reasonable rest days e.g. choose not to work on one day of the week as to get a complete rest. If I start implementing these strategies now, I may be able to be prepared for the upcoming Saturday 20th shoot.

WK2 Thursday I noticed how I'd been falling behind on reflection. I'd been updating my production log days after the day had happened; which is fine, but causes me to delay other written work which I could be doing instead. If I reflected on each filming day on the day we actually filmed, then I wouldn't have to find time in the following days to reflect and evaluate. There are benefits to delaying the reflection process: Firstly, it allows you to rest after the filming day has been done. Secondly, you can reflect on the day with a refreshed, ready mind the following day, ensuring you cover everything appropriately and thoroughly. Because of these reasons, I've been reflecting after the filming days but, again, that puts me behind on my written work.

I decided to go ahead to with what I'm currently doing; I just made myself aware, on this day, that that may mean I fall behind on some written work and may need to do more on my rest days. Although, on second thought, that may not be a good idea as my filming has suffered from me being exhausted on filming days. If I push myself too hard to write up everything on my rest/editing days, then I may cause myself more trouble. At this moment, I don't know what do. Upon this reflection, I will attempt to try the alternative method of reflecting on the same day. I will try it for a week and assess the benefits at the end of the trial period and see which method is better. I haven't done something like this before, I'm curious to know how it turns out.

I also learnt today that Jamie Green (RRC) won't be able to do Wednesday 24th next week, which complicates things. I'll have to move that filming date with the rugby team to the following week just a few days before the hand in! That's cutting it close. More on this later once everything is rearranged.

WK2 Saturday challenged me more than any other day so far. We arrived at 9:30 at the heath on the decided call time but none of the actors showed until 20 minutes later, this immediately put me under a lot of stress as we'd planned to film the remainder of all the scenes on the heath today. This meant we were half an hour behind even before started filming. Jim and Noah were late because Jim's wife had gotten worse again, this understandably made Jim and Noah reluctant to come today but I'm so grateful that they did. Jim requested, before we started, that they want to finish as early as possible so they could return home. With this request in my mind, I had to rework the planned shot list for the day. I prioritized SC6 as this is one of the major scenes in the film that required both actors; as I also knew that this scene would take the longest to film, I planned to only get this scene done with Jim and Noah and then send them home. This meant that the other scenes we planned today would need to be moved to another shooting day - we settled for next Sunday. This is incredibly stressful as that means we'll still be filming major scenes only a few days before the projects final deadline; I still need to accommodate for editing, reflecting and all my other FMP work. I anticipate it's going to be a stressful, work-filled 13 days; I don't think I'll have a chance to rest during that time.

We got started at 10:00; the first thing we noticed about today was that it was freezing cold. At only 5'C, the entire team reported how frozen they were (this was also due to the chilling winds today). Ironically, we were filming a scene that required Nick and Noah to be wearing nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. Because of this, Nick and Noah really struggled to concentrate on the scene, so we gave them coats between takes, then, just before action was called for the next take, we'd remove the coats from them and rolled the scene. This worked at keeping Noah warm, and then energized for the scene; with him suddenly being entered into the cold, his nervous energy came through in his performance, which benefited the scene.

The cold also didn't help the crew. There were reports that people couldn't feel their hands, which compromised their ability to manage their roles efficiently e.g. handling the zoom box (small buttons) and holding the boom mic. Tommy said that he was fine on camera but I could tell that his hands were purple, which couldn't have been a good thing! To work around this problem we sent for someone to gather coats and gloves from their home, mid-shoot, to give to people who needed them. this worked well enough for us to continue to slightly later in the day, but we still should've planned for this. In the risk assessment, I mentioned extreme weather as a possible factor for the outdoor scenes, but I noted it as something that shouldn't need to worry about. I shouldn't have done this, in fact, if I had made this a concern initially, we would've been checking the weather forecast everyday before filming outside and then brought the appropriate equipment before hand. If I had done this, the shoot probably would've lasted longer and the cast/crew would've been more efficient in their roles. In future, I won't overlook weather as a possible risk factor, I will prepare for it before going out at all.

Another issue that came with the cold, was how the batteries died quicker in all of our equipment. The camera quickly lost charge and we went through almost all of them by lunch; the same went for the zoom box. There was nothing we could do here other than Tommy keeping the camera and gimbal switched off between takes, while we reset, as to maximize our use of the equipment. But there was no way we could've warmed the batteries in the that temperature anyway. I'm glad we bought the extra batteries before filming; as we can't charge the depleted batteries outside, we only have what we start with. And as we finished with nearly all four of the batteries drained, we realized then that if Tommy and I hadn't bought those extra batteries, we wouldn't have been able to do a day like this. I'm relieved that we prepared for this, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to film every scene we already have, and we wouldn't have managed to get it done in the time we had for this project.

When filming the stunt scene with Noah, where he almost breaks his hips, we decided to film him sprinting while using the gimbal. This was a great choice, but that meant that I couldn't see the monitor as we were filming it, I just stood and watched from a distance. This meant that between each take Tommy and I had to rewatch what we filmed to know if we needed to do it again. This doubled our reset time and took up far too much time on set. During our pre production phase, we looked at hiring out a monitor from the college technical hatch, but we decided against it, as it didn't have direct way of connecting to the SONY A6000, and the cable connector it used was only half a meter long. Preferably, we would've liked to use a Bluetooth monitor, so that I could watch what we were getting from a distance, but we didn't have that sort of cable. We could've looked into purchasing one, and I wish we did, this would've made shooting this scene a lot easier (as the camera movements were so involved).

Wind has never been so much of an issue until today. Joe reported back to me, almost after every take, that the sound was unusable, and we'd have to go again. Even though we purchased a dead-cat for the microphones, it still didn't do enough to block the wind. I'm slightly concerned that the scene will be unusable or that the dialogue will be so quite that we can't make out what they're saying. In some takes, we tried using a diffuser as a wind shield from the mic, but that reportedly interfered with the dialogue capture so we couldn't do this every time. For some of the takes, this wind shield did work, but it was awkward to manage. Somebody tall needed to stand with the microphone to block the wind and also be out of frame at the same time. Balancing these two tasks was almost impossible for the person so we ended up scrapping the idea and settling for the high winds. Hopefully, I can find a way to bring the wind levels down in the audio during post production, but I'm not sure if I'll have the time to do so. We couldn't do much to avoid this wind today; we couldn't have picked another day as this was everybody's only availability. The only work around would have been to film a month later, which wouldn't be possible for the FMP.

Overall, I came away from today feeling exhausted. Right now, I'm still so cold that I can't feel my fingers while typing, and so tired that I'm ready to go to sleep. Tomorrow, I plan to go through the footage in the morning and then go to the hospital to film the coach's office. I'm looking forward to it as it I know it will be a chilled, controlled shoot from my end. I can focus on directing the actors more as the camera is almost completely still throughout the scene. We also don't have any strict time pressures, as we have all afternoon on the location and actors are available until 6pm (we're starting from 2pm). Looking ahead, I'm worried that I'll be so overrun with work, that I won't have any time to rest and will be burnt out by the end of next week. If I keep on top of a consistent work flow now, then I may be okay.

The Snorricam in action at the Hospital! It worked really well, the footage turned out just as I'd hoped. We did rush this shot slightly as we were nearing the end of the day, but we got it done and I'm happy with it. Looking back over the footage, you couldn't tell that shot felt rushed - we only managed 3 takes, which is below average (averaging 8 takes per shot). Because of the late start with costumes, this shot was pushed right to the end of our schedule. If we had properly organised the costume prep before today, we would've had more time to work on this shot with Jim. For future projects, I'll have preliminary costume meetings, before shooting, with the actors and corresponding department. Here we would discuss exactly what the characters should be wearing for each scene therefore removing any time wasting on the day with the uncertainty of what characters are wearing for each scene. In actuality, actors wouldn't generally organize there own costumes as this would handled fully by the wardrobe team.

WEEK 3

PLAN

SUNDAY - Coach's office shoot at the hospital. Jim and Patrick from the cast are called; Joe, Emma, Tommy, myself and AD are called from crew. Crew from 2:00-18:00. Cast from 2:00-18:00. Sort through remaining unfiltered footage.

MONDAY - Editing SC6. Include write up.

TUESDAY - Continue editing anything that's needed. Tannery Drift shoot. Noah and Lorely called from cast from 16:00-19:00. All crew called from 15:30-19:00

WEDNESDAY - Sort through footage and continue editing and Wix write up.

THURSDAY - Edit and prep for the evening shoot at the Daintrey's. Jim, Noah and Alison called from 18:15-. All crew called.

FRIDAY - Sort through footage and edit. Return to the Daintrey's to finish the final shoot, same as Thursday for cast/crew call times.

SATURDAY - Melbourn VC shoot. Call time TBD. Alison and Noah called. All crew called. Sort through footage end of day.

WK3 Sunday was a simple day. I felt my directing was at its strongest today, and I'm happy with the footage we got. Everybody arrived at the hospital at the correct time and we started dressing (as we did from the previous hospital shoot) the room at 14:05 and started filming at 14:30. We got through the shots at a good pace despite setting the new record for the shot with most takes on the Mascot project: 19 takes. In fact, most of the shots today averaged at 15 takes per shot. This has left me feeling confident that we've got everything we'll for the scene we were shooting; SC29.

We only ran into a few small issues today, the first being: when filming the wide, establishing shot, we had to get the whole room in the frame. The downside to this, was that we somehow needed to record dialogue and hide the entire crew. When initially setting up the shot, there was too much equipment in the left side of the frame that we had to completely tidy all sides of the room and find another area to keep the crew. This cost us some time. If we'd properly scouted this location before hand, we would've been prepared for situation like this. Whilst I'm grateful that the hospital was available to us again on such short notice, the lack of planning did stump us a few times today.

Another example that came from this problem: In the scene, Nick storms out of the room and slams the door cutting, Coach's line and leaving for quite a powerful moment. When we got to the shot, which involved tracking the actor out of the room, we didn't realize that the door opened outwards from the room. As we were following in front of Nick, this meant he couldn't open the door, because we (Tommy and I) were in his way. If Jim were to reach out and open the door, he'd get far too close to the camera causing the shot to look bad. We also tried: Jim reaching out, acting as if he was opening the door, and then had a crew member open the door behind us, but looking back over the footage, it didn't make sense for Jim to open the door, then have him step outside with it already swung wide (surely he'd be walking right next to the door). Either way we tried, we couldn't get it to look good. We were ready to scrap the shot completely until we came up with an idea that theoretically worked. We planned: film the shot the same as before but with the door open, leaving space for the camera to stop; I then call 'Hold.' While keeping the camera rolling, we set up for the second part of the shot by closing the door on Jim and pushing lens up to the window on the door, then I call 'Action,' for a second time and we film the second part of the shot with Jim pushing the door open and leaving - but from outside. The idea, was to edit in a visual effect to make it seem like the camera was moving through the glass, in a seamless take. We went with this, and hoped that it may work. I'll look into editing that with Tommy tomorrow.

As a director, I connected with Jim and Patrick better than I did on the first day of filming, with them on the bench. I began to understand how to get them to take on different direction from each take. I asked Patrick to stress different words within his lines in hopes that he would approach line differently from what he'd preconceived. This worked quite well, and we got most of his lines pretty spot on. Although, looking back over the footage, there are still one or two lines which he didn't quite get right for me, but that's on me. I should've kept going with Patrick to ensure every line was said correctly at one point; instead I overlooked it and kept moving. In my defense, we finished at exactly 17:30, which I had promised the actors, so I was conscious of time. But in future, I'm now more prepared with how to direct Patrick and Jim, and will ensure my understanding of the lines before the day so we can get through the shots quickly.

Overall, a really successful, we managed to get everything we'd planned, as well as few extra inserts, which made me even more happy. The team were so connected today that we even went out to the pub as mini celebration of where this project has gone so far. This small event: I perceived as a team building moment, where we could get together and talked about the film, what they've learnt from the experience so far and kept them encouraged for the remainder of the shooting days. This directive really helped the evening and I feel everybody is comfortable and excited for busy week ahead. I think it's good to appreciate the work that we've done and give light on other people experiences on this project; I've learnt, after tonight, that this isn't just a project for me and Tommy, it's also a project for Emma, Joe, Jim, Patrick and everybody else involved. Everybody is learning something new and trying something different, and I'm really grateful that I'm there to encourage that.

WK3 Monday I spent editing - I really struggled today. I went into college to edit all the footage from Saturday and Sunday's filming. I was immediately met with discouragement when I started looking at Saturday's footage and audio, this was where I learnt that the audio was completely unusable from Saturday. This was due to the 50mph winds that continuously lasted throughout the day. I did mention on Saturday that the wind may have interfered with the audio but I didn't expect it to be this bad. You can barely make out what the characters are saying and even when you can, the wind is so distracting that it completely ruins the emotion of the scene. A quick google search advised me to add a high pass filter and gradually increase the rate at which frequencies are muted. Technically, it worked, the wind was gone, but so many frequencies had been removed that the dialogue sounded like they were speaking into a tin. Tommy tried removing the wind manually in Adobe Audition but that didn't work - it wasn't precise enough to only find the dialogue, instead we were just left with the highest pitches making it just as unusable. Overall, the day's audio will have to be reshot on a day with much less wind on the field. There was nothing we could do to work around this; it was unlucky weather, which just happened to be effecting us on the day we were filming on an open field. Ironically, every time we've filmed on the heath, the wind has randomly spiked to 30-50mph, then going back down to regular speeds on every other day. This annoying coincidence annoys me, but I mustn't let it get to me, I have to find another day to reshoot when the winds are confirmed to be low. If I don't get a chance to reshoot, then I'll have to make do with the windy audio for that scene - not ideal.

I couldn't focus when editing the heath's footage, it kept frustrating me. I thought the best thing for me to do was to move onto something else to take my mind off of it. I decided to take a look at Sunday's footage from the hospital and edit scene 29. I was happy with this footage so thought it would be a good idea to help calm my mind. I got through it quite quickly; I was sifting through different takes and found good lines and versions of the shot, thanks to the many takes I allowed myself to get for each shot. It paid off to get that many takes, I'll continue to do it for this project to ensure I get the most out of my actors.

I did have a small problem, however; because the scene is an argument, and I want it to be quickly jumping between the character's jabs and retorts, there weren't that many moments of silence between the takes (or the beats weren't as long as I needed them to be). Traditionally, this is fine while filming, as I can lengthen beats in the editing process by cutting between reaction shots. However, in this instance, there were limited breaks between the actors lines and I found it difficult to find beats of rest in the edit. After Coach's line 'He's not a rugby player', there needed to be a longer beat than what the actors left on the day; I couldn't find a long enough reaction from Jim before Patrick started his next line. To work around this, I duplicated the 2 second beat that Jim leaves between the lines and then reversed it to make one continuous motion. that way, the shot was twice as long leaving a long enough beat, and it also felt continuous, without having to cut away. It didn't appear as jarring as I thought it would, so I kept with it and it makes the scene work. I have a feeling that this won't always work, however, so I need to be more clear with my actors that: beats should be longer. This project has proved so far that slowness in reality doesn't feel as slow while on camera.

Once I'd finished editing the scene in the coach's office, Tommy and I came together to work on the window shot we experimented with on Sunday. We didn't really know where to start other than by looking for inspiration for the visual effect. Tommy remembered a famous shot from Contact (1997), where the girl runs down the corridor to get medicine for her dad and the camera miraculously comes through the mirror. Whilst the shot isn't exactly what we were trying to replicate, we took as some inspiration to edit the shot. I liked how seamless the two shots blended together in the film, so wanted to take that from Contact and use that in this shot.

We took the footage into premier pro and began editing the shot. We tried cutting out the wait between the take but that looked quite jarring and wasn't as seamless as the Contact shot. So instead we tried overlapping the shots and gradually fading the opacity between them, this worked brilliantly and it looked as if the camera was moving through the window. But, despite this shot turning out well and exactly how we'd want it; I found it too distracting for the scene as it interrupts the emotion - causing you to think about the bizarre phase through glass shot you just saw. If the glass was clear, the shot would've been less distracting and the audience would've been able to keep their focus on the characters rather than the VFX shot. It's a shame that we're not going to use it, but I'm glad that it worked anyway; I'll keep this effect in mind for future project now that it has been tested and proven to work.

WK3 Tuesday we filmed at Tannery Drift. I was quite nervous leading up to today as we only had one small window to get everything we needed - there was no going back. We got to the site at 3:30 to sign in as visitors, the actors weren't scheduled to arrive for another half an hour, which gave us time to set up in the classroom. But almost as soon as we got there, we ran into a major problem; the headteacher asked to see me so she could sign some documents to ensure that we wouldn't film any confidential information that's private to the school. And I hadn't brought anything. I did discuss this with Emma a few weeks ago but she was stuck in Cambridge all evening - without the documents. This meant that I had to say to the head teacher that we don't have anything for her to sign and that we may have to leave. Thankfully, because I went to the school, she said that she knows me well enough to let me film here but she needs me to sign something confirming that we wouldn't film any of that information. She quickly wrote a document down on a postit note and had me sign it with a date, but she wasn't very impressed. I'm glad she let us film but she asked we bring an official document in at another time to ensure this matter's safety then. I'm really annoyed that I didn't prepare for this issue, whilst it wasn't an issue for us, it could've been serious. For any other location, we would've been sent away and the lost the day. I'm grateful that we didn't but I have definitely learnt my lesson here. If we had brought the appropriate documents today we could've avoided this entire problem. I should be much more prepared and keep on top of these things myself; as a producer of the film as well, I should always be thinking about the legal side of the production and ensuring that we are following the correct regulations when going to any location. Thinking about things like: Safeguarding, public protection, brand protection and many other legal requirements that, as a director, you wouldn't usually have to think about.

The filming process went by smoothly, however, the school were very welcoming and allowed us to move anything we wanted around the classroom. We had Noah for only an hour and a half, which meant we had to prioritize his shots over the teacher's. But in the end, we got everything we wanted, and it turned out to be quite a chilled shoot that didn't involve much stress. As Thursday evening was cancelled today as well, that gives me time to edit and write up over the next 3 days, covering everything on my blog and finishing off tabs.

As what we filmed at Tannery is a short scene, I decided to sort and edit the footage we got in a rough cut this evening. It turned out really well other than one tiny problem. In the scene, the teacher gets up from her chair and walks across the classroom to Noah, while unboxing a pack of card. This sound would be best to record live on set, but, because the shot is so wide, the boom mic had to be quite far away but still tracking the sound. Joe (monitoring sound) instructed the boom operator to track the footsteps with the mic. What we didn't anticipate for, was that we'd hear the boom pole moving in the mic while it's changing direction. This left each track, that involved the actor moving in the wide, to be unusable as we could hear the boom mic moving around. Because of this, there was no clean track of the actor moving across the room. We should've kept the boom mic still to avoid any unwanted sound. Or, with a more updated updated boom, it could make less noise; but we don't have the money for that so the first option is our best. In future, I will instruct the boom operator to be as still as possible when holding the boom pole, to ensure we don't get any unwanted noise ruining the track. I'll also make sure Joe is aware of this so that he can stay on top of it in future shoots.

To find a fix for this audio problem, I had to painstakingly pick out clean footsteps from the audio tracks and blend them together to make a unique footstep track. Then, I had to sync the track to the footsteps and the card unfold. This worked relatively well, and goes surprisingly unoticed:

Before Dressing

After Dressing

Wide Shot - Coach's Office

WK3 Friday we filmed at the Daintrey's house again to try and get through as much of the house scenes as possible. I got there early at 15:30 to set up before the actors and the rest of the crew arrived at 18:00. Once everybody arrived I tried to urge everyone to get moving but instead people resorted to chattering and conversation; whilst I understand that this team have now gotten to know each other quite well, it caused us to be delayed by pleasant conversation. I couldn't have this, we already on a strict schedule, Noah had to return home before 20:00 and we were closing in on 18:20 without any filming at all. This massively frustrated me and caused my mental approach to directing, this evening, to be short tempered and misguided.

I was moving things along quickly; as we were behind schedule for the night, I limited myself to two takes per shot. Whilst I wasn't a fan of how rushed the footage felt, I appreciate that we'd actually got footage. When filming scene 4, we had to simulate the night's darkness, despite the natural daylight still present in the evening. We taped bin bags to the outside of all the windows, they worked perfectly as light blockers. However, as we also needed the lights to be off (for the scene to look as dark as we wanted it), that meant barely any light was coming through the camera lens. This then caused a subtle red flashing light to appear in the footage, similar to what we saw the last time we were at the Daintrey's. We discovered that it was happening because there wasn't enough light coming into the camera, so it automatically flashed a red light for it to find depth in the footage. There was no way to turn this off, but we did know that we needed more light coming through the lens. So, we increased the amount of TV light to bounce off of Jim and Alison to get enough light coming through the lens. This removed the flashing light and we could move on to the next shot.

This incident annoyed me, as we'd encountered this problem with the camera before. If we had tried dealing with the problem once we'd discovered it, then we wouldn't have to deal with it at all today. Instead, we wasted time in tonight's shoot because we failed to fix a problem which should've been dealt with weeks ago. But even though we know how to avoid the issue now, there probably won't be many shots left to film that involve the solution. This means that we won't be able to apply this solution to this project but maybe to others. This fact annoys me greatly; I put a job to one side, and now I've suffered twice for it. If there ever is a problem I encounter in future projects, I should find fix to it as soon as I can, because there probably is one, and it's best to avoid it before it happens again.

The other issue that came from tonight's shoot was how everybody was so exhausted we could barely get to the end of the night. It is Friday today, so everybody has just come home from a weeks worth of work, and we were filming until 9:30 at full capacity. Understandably, everyone was shattered, but it really drained the actor's performances and the crew's efficiency. Whilst today's shoot wasn't planned to be on a Friday exactly (it was the result of Jim's wife taking seriously ill, so had to move the filming dates back), we had to push on with this evening and get what we could. We did plan for reshoots, but not this many. We couldn't have anticipated Jim's wife's condition, so everyone is very understanding of the situation we've ended up going through. But unfortunately, our production quality has lowered and that will come through in the final cut. I'm choosing not to get as distraught by this as I usually would, as I can't afford to get caught up in emotional issues while leading a tightly held project. We just have to keep moving, and finish filming as soon as we can.

However, on that note, we could spread the filming days over the next month to ensure people are well rested; but that would mean Tommy and I won't hit the deadline for the rough cut of the film. Having thought of this, I feel quite bad for pushing people so hard for a college project. It may also be acting as a professional production as well, but I can't help but feel responsible for this burn out people are feeling. I need to ignore this concern and finish the project now, as dates have already been agreed and schedules been written.

WK3 Saturday was, personally, the worst day of filming. This morning, Tommy told me that sports centre (where we were planning to film at next to Melbourn VC) had just gone into liquidation! The staff and site team were told this morning as well so everything felt like it was falling apart before we even got there. Once we arrived, we found that the site was closed off to us, this meant that we couldn't film where we intended, and more importantly, where we'd planned the storyboard around. This meant that we needed to recreate the shot list for the scene on the fly - except, Tommy wasn't there to do it with me.

Tommy didn't realize that we started at 2:00. Once everyone had arrived and was ready to film, I messaged Tommy and asked where he was, he said that he thought everybody got to Melbourn at 2:30. This was not the case. We were delayed by 20 minutes from this, which was even more stressful because we were already on a tight schedule for today as Alison needed to leave at 4:00. We used our waiting time for Tommy to set up the first shot, but even still, we waited for 10 minutes with the shot ready before Tommy arrived. This incident was because of poor communication between the team. I remember confirming with the team last night that we were filming at 2:00 instead of 2:30 (like it said on the group chat). Tommy must've missed that in some way as he followed what we decided on the group chat from weeks ago.

Once Tommy arrived, we couldn't dwell on mistakes, so we got started right away. But, as soon as we started rolling the first take, a leaf blower switched on in the estate in front of the school site. We couldn't get clear sound at all, let alone hear each other speak. This was wildly frustrating for the team, and I admittedly got slightly upset, probably due to how some many things had gone wrong before we'd even started filming - it was either humorous or maddeningly upsetting. We thought, if we waited the leaf bower out, he would quickly move on to another part of the estate, which was more manageable for the sound team. This wasn't very proactive of us, and we ended up waiting for 10 minutes without any change. Eventually, Emma went to talk to the gardener about our situation, and he said he'd take a break and start again in 30 minutes. We took this opportunity to get some clean dialogue takes, so had to rework the new shot list order again. Thankfully we managed to get everything needed, as the gardener didn't ever resume his work for the rest of the day.

I was annoyingly wasn't very proactive in my problem solving skills today, I think that was because I felt so defeated before the day had even begun, that I didn't have the correct mindset to tackle even more problems. This was made apparent later on in the day with another issue. This was the first day of shooting where Noah would be without Jim. Instead, my mum, a fully qualified DBS certified person, was supervising Noah because Jim was busy looking after his wife. Clearly, Noah wanted to go home throughout the entire shoot. Whilst he had enthusiasm for the majority of the shoot, his mind wasn't in the right place as it had been before today. He started complaining at the end of every take, and asked to move on to the next as quickly as possible, this was clearly not the right Noah we'd before. Which is why I've assumed it's because his dad wasn't acting with him today. Noah's boredom worked in the scenes favor, however, as he was going to school, so thankfully the scene looks fine upon review. However, this brought my attitude to directing even lower than it was at the beginning of the shoot.

Half way through the shoot, I got a message, from Patrick, asking if we were still going ahead with reshooting some of the rugby pitch scenes on the Heath. I checked the weather to approve this but found that the winds were over 20kmh and forecast heavy rain for the whole day. I reluctantly had to cancel tomorrow's shoot. This was the final blow that discouraged me from today, I'm honestly surprised I kept directing to end of the day.

With these situations in mind, and how I reacted to them - I'm appalled. I'm the director, the leader of the team, the one who managed today and all the other days we've done and are yet to do. I shouldn't be letting problems and inconveniences get in the way of my ability to lead a team or direct my creative vision. Even though the footage we got today was good, and my intended direction still came through, I still significantly brought the spirits of my team down with me, and that's not on. I need to stay positive for my team and for myself, if a series of problems line themselves up in front of me, I shouldn't cower or give up; instead, I should face them, a proactively deal with them thereby increasing production quality and ensuring my team stay positive.

Today has taught me a lot about directing and leading a team. I've learnt to be proactive in every practical situation, otherwise we could lose time, filming opportunities and many other crucial parts of the production process. I'm surprised at how different I approached today; before, I'd been quite proactive in problem solving and have been able to keep the day moving on low takes or minimal batteries. But for some reason, today was different - I can't let it happen again. For the rest of this project, I'm now consciously prepared for proactive mindset and won't let problems interfere with my ability to direct or manage the team.

WK4 Tuesday was what we'd been preparing for since we started this project. We had barely any time to prepare before today as Jamie Green (the RRC manager) hadn't been in contact with me prior until a few hour ago. He message me in the late hours of Monday, confirming that he'd like us to come down to their training session on the Tuesday evening, where we could film them; then have half an hour to stage a few scenes with the team (similar to what we had with the college team).

As Tommy and I didn't have much time to prepare, we had to use the storyboard/shooting script that we used for the college rugby team, in hopes that it would be at a good enough standard for the actual shoot. We considered my notes from the practice sequence and went from there. Now that I know that some filming days can spring up on me, especially when working with an external party, I will prepare for the filming day to come up at any time. As soon as a potential contender for a location, or team of people say that they're available, I should be ready to go for it to maximize their availability. That way, I don't waste my time, they don't waste mine, and I don't waste their's.

Once my team had got to the pitch, we got set up and waited for the rugby team to begin their session. The sun was just starting to set so we got some shots with the sun in frame, to lose any long shadows that we might cast (this also benefited is in capturing the nice sunset while the sequenced played out). With the constantly lowering sun, however, we did have to keep changing the exposure settings. this wasn't a problem for us as the team were very stop and start. One issue we did have when filming the training session, was the gimbal's sudden inability to stabilize the footage. The gimbal, especially when still, couldn't stop jittering and track the subject; it was more noticeable on the longer shots. We soon discovered that it was because of the shotgun mic that we'd attached to the camera. We realized that we hadn't stabilized the camera with the shotgun mic on it, and we assumed that the settings wouldn't need to be changed. We then needed to make the decision to remove the shot mic or keep it on and settle for the jitter. Personally, I thought it'd be more beneficial to keep the shotgun mic on the camera; it was our only directional source of audio (we had Joe and Emma recording ambiance a few yards behind us),

and the footage is arguably better if it's shaky, rather than smooth. I decided to leave it on and let the jitteriness persist. I'm glad I made this decision, whilst the footage does look a little jarring at times, it mainly adds to the kinetic feel of a rugby game that I wanted from the beginning. From this decision, we also kept our directional source of audio, which massively helped the scene come to life when in post (more on that later).

We eventually moved onto the final part of the evening, where we could stage some shots. Weirdly, the Royston team were harder to direct than the college team, I didn't anticipate this. I thought, since they were more experienced, they'd understand and be able to everything exactly as I directed. This was not the case. I had to explain everything at least twice and in two different ways, this took up more time than the college team did. The difference between the two sessions, I think, is that for the college team, their coaches where with us when we were filming, and if I asked them to do something, the coaches would ensure that that happened. For the RRC, Jamie disappeared before the staged shoot and I had to manage the whole team myself. We did get everything we wanted out of them; the test definitely helped, I don't know what we would've done without it. But I do find it interesting how different the two experiences were.

Tests will determine the quality of the final product, but the two certainly won't be identical - is my biggest takeaway from this experience. I'm glad that we prepared for today, but we still had to adapt to some unforeseen circumstances. I shouldn't be satisfied with the test, thinking that the actual production will go the same way, otherwise, I'd be thrown when I realize that that's not the case. For future projects, I will continue to test before initiating the actual product, but I will also expect changes and should prepare for those as well. Overall, I'm really happy with today, and I can't wait to properly sort through the footage and create a good sequence. We didn't manage to film everything with our actors as we lost the light from the evening, so we decided to come back another evening to pick those shots up (would only take ten minutes so I'm not worried). I'm glad that we managed to finally get in communication with Jamie, even if it was slightly last minute from his end. We were prepared, we got what we needed, and I'm happy to move forward.

WK4 Wednesday I edited the rugby sequence. It took me a while to sort through the footage (all 45 minutes of training), the hard part was having to not just watch it, but be looking out for a few good seconds that may flash by without even realizing. To ensure I didn't miss anything, I clipped what I liked, then watched everything again a second time. This helped and I found a few extra clips which I missed before hand.

I immediately dragged the clips into Premier Pro and used the practice sequence as a template. I'd hoped we could use some of the shots from the test sequence, that I really liked, but because of the different times of day, they didn't match at all. I wanted the sequence to start at its peak intensity, then slowly work it's way down to the hospital corridor. That way, the tension is still simmering, and we immediately kick off with excitement. Whilst this did work, once I'd exported it, I noticed something that was quite jarring: the light levels were constantly changing. Even though the shots worked together, you could tell they weren't lining up because of the change in the time of day. This took me out of the scene. As we'd filmed the staged shots in the last few minutes of the evening, the sun had pretty much gone away - compared to the opening, when the sun was out and setting brightly. Because of this, I had to change the entire edit so that it felt like it was happening in sequence. This was even harder now. I had to find clips that worked together, kept the right pacing, and all under strict light levels. I spent an extra day trying to figure this out, eventually through, I got an edit which achieved this, but I lost an entire day to get there.

If I had considered this before editing then I would've known that this would've been quite a jarring decision. But I didn't lay anything out beforehand. If I had made a plan of the scene before sitting down to edit (rather than just going off of my instinct), I wouldn't have wasted a day to re-draft the sequence. In future, I'd like to write a plan of what I need from a scene before I start editing it. I'd like to lay out what I want from the scene, what will work and what won't before I even try. I understand that some of these problems will still go unseen in this phase, but at least I have an idea of what to avoid and what to try before I even start. I've noticed how I treat editing like directing; when I'm doing both roles on the same movie (this case), then I should make sure they are separated and not approached in the same way. My directing is based off of what feels right for me and what I'm seeing in my mind. Editing should be based off of a plan that I can lay out beforehand, that way I can avoid mistakes.

I feel like this entire sequence has taught me how different the directing and editing roles are, whilst they should work in collaboration, some decisions are best left up to the editor and not the director. As an editor, I've also learnt the importance of light levels, if they are constantly changing, that will throw the audience off. In fact, as an editor, I should always be aware of decisions that could confuse the audience. For example, my teachers keep pointing out to me that I have ignored the 180 rule in scene 7, whilst this was intentional as a director (I wanted the change to be separate scene from the rest of the scene as a whole), as an editor, it was difficult to tie that into the flow of the film. I'm yet to learn how to marry directing and editing together, this is a skill which I hope to develop in either upcoming projects or in the final few stages of this one.

WK5 Sunday Reshoots. Today was a good day. I admittedly am no longer documenting my production log on the same day as the shoots as I simply don't have the time to do that anymore. With the last 5 days now here, I have sanctioned editing days to themselves and blogging days to themselves, I believe this is the most efficient process in the final few days.

Today went well, as a whole. I'm really happy with how the actors performed, the crew performed, and my own performance as the director. The day started at 9:00, and with Tommy forgetting the SD cards, so he needed to return to his home to get them, which caused us to lose half an hour of the morning. Thanks to the Melbourn shoot, I forced myself to stay calm, and not get bothered by the delay. I proceeded to chat to the cast and crew and be updated on their personal state in the project. I was delighted to hear that Becca (Jim's wife) had been getting better; thanks to her recent diagnosis of Crohn's disease, she has started taking the appropriate medication. Jim also mentioned how he has been feeling much more improved compared to how he started, including Noah as well. This brief downtime, allowed for me to connect with the actors before filming, and once Tommy arrived, I felt even more settled and ready to direct.

We needed to return the gimbal back to Joseph the day prior to today but we managed to book the college gimbal on the Friday for the weekend. This came in handy for the shoot, I'm glad we booked this out on short notice. We did agree with Joseph that we'd only have the gimbal through the month of April; I'd completely lost track of time and hadn't realized it was May! We were lucky here that we got the other gimbal on short notice, but in future, we should be more prepared and plan for this before production begins. Hired equipment are just as influential on the filming schedule as are actors.

To my surprise, Jim was incredible today. His acting was far better than anything I'd seen from him in this project. I realized in this moment, how much Jim had grown as an actor from this project. I felt incredibly proud of how far he'd come despite his circumstances and felt the need to congratulate his achievement. The same can be said for Noah as well. As for the reshoot, it was very successful. We reframed the shot I didn't like from scene 25 and, as I mentioned, Jim and Noah were so much more expressive. The scene felt complete from this reshoot and I'm so glad we did it. And because of my level headed-ness, I felt capable in my directing and managed the team well despite the delays and time restrictions.

Editing the scene gave me so much more confidence in this project. I felt that this scene (SC25) had become the most powerful and impactful scene in the whole film; this was important to me as it's the climax of the film as well. I feel this scene reflects my directing in the best light, and Tommy's cinematography work well too. In fact, every aspect of this scene is at it's best here, I think, and I'm glad it's summarized in the climax of the film.

WK5 Monday Reshoots but not as good as yesterday. What started as a hopeful day, eventually turned into a tricky day to process. It was a day that gave us everything and gave me a lot of stress. We picked this day to reshoot as the winds were low, but we didn't anticipate that because the winds were low, there would be planes (without high winds, Royston is clearly a popular flight path). Throughout the entire day, planes were flying over the Heath, which meant we had to cut on perfectly good takes. Then, when there wasn't a plane, there was wind or rain, and then, if neither appeared, there would be people walking into frame and staring. It was quite unfortunate that these things kept happening causing us to keep cutting the shot and resetting. But when editing the scene, we found that it worked anyway because we did manage to end up with the right takes.

For this shoot, however, Joe and I had been working on a custom windshield for the boom mic so that it would completely block all wind from hitting the mic. We molded a metal wire to act as a skeleton then wrapped a thick woolly jumper over the mesh. We then stuffed the empty space inside with bed sheets and used rope ties to fasten everything together around the mic. To our complete surprise, this worked on the day and we couldn't here any wind through the mic. The dialogue was slightly dampened by this, but when we increased the volume in post, it sounded clean. Overall, a good final day, which saw many successes and now that it's done, I feel like I can be happy with how filming went that day, despite the many interference's.

Right is the reframed shot that we got today. I didn't like the over the shoulder, it didn't feel personal enough or close enough for the scene to work. For the reshoot, I also added a brighter spotlight (acting as the sun) from behind him to make the shot look: one, less flat, and two, more 'holy' for the climax of the film. This scene is an example of Nick's faith being at its strongest, and this lighting change helped deliver on that development in Nick's faith. We also added a reflector in front of Jim so that we didn't need any light from the top of the stairs.

Production

FMP

Before Dressing

After Dressing

Noah's Hip X-Ray

Before Dressing

After Dressing

Wide Shot - Coach's Office

First Draft

Second Draft

FMP Cut