Production diary content

I did multiple roles in pre production and on the shoot, such as: Camera Operator, Actor, Photography, BTS, Hair and Makeup.
Having many job roles meant I always had something to do, so therefore I always had to be concentrating and prepared to switch job roles quickly. Preparation was key for this film, but since I had so many roles, it was hard to practice before the real shoot. Although I was learning while working well.
In Pre-production I was in charge of doing the photography for the band posters for the bedroom scene. I also edited the posters and printed them out for the art department to use for this scene.

On the first day of shooting, my first job was to get six different actors in ‘The Party Scene’ into hair and makeup. I did hair and make up touches throughout the day. This took around two hours because the neon style makeup had to be perfect.

Later that day, I was doing behind the scenes camera work for most of the day, which involved talking to other crew members and asking them what was going on. At the end of the day I was camera operator for Charlie’s nightmare scene. The challenge using the camera at this point was we had a special lens, that Louie (the DOP) made. The lens was hard to focus as it hd been specially designed to blur at the edges, giving a distorted effect.

On the second day I started by camera operating for the flat scene. This involved pulling focus between the two characters as they exchanged dialogue. This was challenging because we hadn’t rehearsed doing it before hand. It involved needing to know the dialogue and getting timings right, this took a number of takes. I also filmed behind the scenes, before doing my own hair and make-up for the advert scene. Doing the advert scene was the most challenging thing I did all weekend, it was a lot of pressure as it was a monologue. There were a lot of lines to deliver all at once. All with a room people watching and needing me to get it right. I was nervous and very self conscious, but I got through it. The performance was meant to be portrayed to the audience as awkward so it worked brilliantly!

For both the costume and make up and for the avert scene I worked closely with Sophia. It was fun to work with her, we’re both like minded in our fashion and make up sense which meant we worked together nicely and didn’t disagree on anything. I worked well with Tove when we were working together in the camera team. The schedule was slightly confusing in terms of who was doing what when and she was flexible about when she was on camera and gave me instructions technically to help with my camera work.I got very nice compliments when I did the camera operating for the flat scene. Also a lot of people on set were complimentary of the hair and makeup I did for the actors.

I improved my knowledge and skills in BFI by listening attentively to the master classes and listening to the tutors. On shooting day I had a the opportunity to work with a big film camera for a few hours so therefore it made me familiar with the camera settings. Overall I felt like the shoot went very well considering most of us haven’t made a film before and the time frame for shooting was very tight. Everyone worked very well together and the rough edit looks brilliant. The one thing that didn’t go very smoothly was the advert because I stumbled on the monologue multiple times. Although, editing made up for the mistakes.