Filming...Action!

We started filming on the Friday of our filming weekend in the S.U to film our nightclub shots. As director I found this first filming to be a learning curve as it was late in the day at the end of the week and energy levels in the group were low. The morale of the team was lessened when it became obvious that it was going to be a very quiet night at the S.U. We had been counting on it not being too busy but we had not expected it to be practically empty, we needed people to fill out the dance floor and make the bar look more like a club. We had brought extras with us but they weren’t enough to fill the dance floor. Due to this a lot of time was wasted deliberating what we were going to do about this, some wanted to call it a night and change the club scenes into house parties. I felt that this would not have fit in with the film and that it would waste the time we had already spent shooting in the S.U. The solution in the end was to film as much as we could at the bar and to re-create a dance floor as best we could in some ones house the following day. It was risky but I felt that we didn’t really have any other choice. It was an experience for me as I felt that it was my responsibility to make sure that we were working as a team, making decisions together and to keep everyone motivated.

Our second day of filming went better, we started early in the morning in the library on campus. Though there was a difficulty in time keeping for some we were organised enough that it didn’t affect the schedule. Our second location that day was Becky’s (producer) house for the home scenes. This was a busy location as there were a lot of costume changes and we were filming in a small area over an extended period of time, which made the team a bit restless. We were all relieved when the bedroom shooting was over. We had a quick team meeting to discuss what we were going to do about the missing dance floor shots and went over the script. We decided to that we could cover up for the missing action by adding a few scenes to the burger location and street location to be filmed the following day.

The final day of filming was on reflexion the most successful day. Morale was high in the team and we had no difficulties. Most of the filming was in town and we had a large gap in filming where we needed to wait for it to get darker which I feel revitalised the team as we were able to have dinner and rest before the late night shooting of the final scenes. Filming ended on a high, I think everyone was proud of what we had filmed and the fact that we had overcome obstacles. I felt confident that we had filmed everything we needed and I was pleased that everyone had worked so well together as a team.