Filming The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Filming began on Tuesday 8th February and lasted from around 4pm until 6pm. During it, we had a couple of friends around to help with setting up the room. Unfortunately, this led to us being fairly distracted throughout, especially since I had to provide food for those guys as well as making sure they kept out of shot (being a good host). This, in turn, led to Tom and I being fairly distracted and, looking back on the footage from that day, made the shots we did fairly bad - we planned to carry on with it on Thursday 10th February, and keep the footage (being a draft).

When it came to Thursday, we took the other day as a clear indicator as to what not to do when filming, and so decided not to allow the others around during the filming so that we could keep focused on the task. Earlier that day we drew out small diagrams of where the camera would be and where it would be pointed at, as well as making certain adjustments to the storyboard as we went through it, and eventually had a very precise "to-do" set for what to film and when.

Another problem from the other day was the non-linear structure of our filming - we filmed shots in a different order than they were in, which (in a room made of glass and thin blinds) resulted in varying lighting throughout the scene. This was bad, so we chose to film instead in a linear fashion, resulting in the lighting getting darker as time passes in the scene, as it should. The original seat was also improvised (one of those office chairs that spins), and looked fairly out of place - so intead, we went with a more traditional wooden chair for the scene.

After all of these changes, we decided to reshoot the entire scene. This seemed appropriate, and still does, for consistency's sake. Luckily, Tom was able to come around on Thursday for as long as we needed (no longer having cricket or other things to do). Without distractions though, we managed to shoot all of the shots in the same time frame as Tuesday's shooting, and making them better.

There were a couple of things that went wrong, like accidentally changing the lighting of certain shots because we left the kitchen light on, but other than that everything went fairly smoothly. In order to save time with shooting, we decided on taking out certain elements that will be returning for the final shoot however - we didn't have the blood, nor a newspaper covered floor (as intended, due to the wooden floor of the room not fitting too well with the atmosphere), Tom wasn't tied down with cling film (instead holding his hands behind him to make it look like he was tied up), there is no party in the last shot and the room was a fairly light colour (though this may be returning, due to a lack of funds and no access to dark sheets - all of them seem to be white in my house).

Overall, the shooting (on the second day at least) went fairly well, and the final shot of the microwave let Tom discover the greatness of Super Noodles, so great!