The first half of our shoot took place on the afternoon of the 17th, a post lunch studio setting. The night before we had helped paint our white room, hauled out our hollow piano from the back of a shipping container, and cleaned a huge piece of Perspex, which made up the performance segment of our video. Now, with those necessary props in place we were ready to start filming.
We followed a half improvised, half written shoot schedule, capturing images of the hands on the piano (supplied by our lovely hand double, always make sure your actor can actually play the instrument you need). Luckily for us our actors hands were similar enough and the 2 bits of footage cut together fine. We also shot most of the lip syncing and a few artsy, shallow depth of field shots which we had the time to do. A difficulty arose where our actor was tense on camera. He managed to fidget and maintain ‘panic eyes’ throughout the entirety of the afternoon, making it very difficult for us when logging our footage. He also refused to spit out his gum despite being told constantly to “Stop chewing!”, meaning again we have been compromised when editing.
We got to a part of the shoot we were all nervous and yet excited about, drawing onto the Perspex as if drawing on nothing. We struggled with how to get the surprisingly heavy piece of Perspex upright without a complex bracketing structure. In the end, we had a man either end of the perspex kindly holding it up for us, and used carefully placed masking tape to guide our actor as to where he was allowed to draw. Despite one tiny hiccup in the first take, involving a spelling mistake with our artist’s name, ‘Peter and the Wolf’, the footage has come out really well and the drawings have given the effect that we were looking for.
Unfortunately as the day drew to a close, we ran out of time to do one shot idea which I was keen to do, where we threw purple paint over our actor to then slow it down in post editing. However overall the day was a success and we all left with a feeling of relief that it wasn’t a giant failure.
