Hey everyone, so today I spent all day with my film club filming a short film. This was an all day event, that involved lots of shooting on location, with 4 or 5 different locations. One of which was a convenience store and another on a bus. It was really interesting.
Now as an engineer with some experience in video production, I lacked much of the skills which would be required to shoot to the level in which we were. I don't know how to operate an audio recorder of professional quality with all the specific settings. Low gain, high pitch, other things either on or off. I don't know what all that does. Mono or stereo or 5.1 surround, the extent of my understanding. I could work a DSLR camera if shown how, but I don't know all that would need to go into framing a shot. I could try, but I'll let the other guys handle it. I can act, but not to the level of the guys in the theater department. I ended up being an extra in one scene and equipment pack mule. I did have the plastic bag and the coke bottle that were useful, and added to the cool toys for the set up shot.
Now here's how my day went. I got up at 7:30 because I could have sworn the director said crew be there at 8:30, and I wanted breakfast, and since I lack a car requiring me to walk to the location, I allotted plenty of time. Well turns out the caf opens at 9 on the weekends. I wouldn't know that since I always sleep until at least 9 on typical weekends, with atypical involving some other form of breakfast available that's better. So I stocked my pockets with a couple power bars and ate one before leaving, since we were planning on eating at Jimmy Johns and I'm not a big fan of sandwich places. Well turns out no one showed up until 8:30 and that was just 1 person. Everyone else got there between 8:45 and 9. Oh well.
We start getting ready to film at about 9. Our audio person couldn't figure out how to turn on the audio or exactly what some of the settings were. I was able to do turn it on and that was the extent of my abilities. She figured out the rest. I ended up playing "guy milling about in store," and "dude," 2 extras. I got to just look around at the merchandise, and look like I was looking for beer with my friends, while watching the craziness. What exactly is that craziness, you'll just have to watch the video. We did end up making a bit of a mess with the fake blood. I asked our Director of Photography if he wanted help cleaning it up but he said it was fine. OK.
After that, we went on to do the exterior shots. Before I went out to do them, I got a 12 oz coke in a glass bottle. I've had 8 oz but not 12. This bottle is big. It doesn't have a twist off top, but good thing I have a can opener that I could use as a bottle opener on my multi-tool. This inspired one of my other friends to get one since he could open it due to my resourcefulness. Anyways, the next shot involved a little girl as a character. It's true, never work with animals or children. I later had a run in with the animal part, but here's what happened with our child. She was rather shy and quiet. When I heard that she might flub her lines but I didn't expect her to just not talk and get super stage fright. We ended up getting what we needed.
We waited for our main character to clean up to do the before the store scenes. And while waiting, a guy nicknamed "Sponge bob" came out to his corner and started his yelling free-styling and stripped dancing. He has his shirt pushed up so it's just on his neck and his chest is exposed, with his pants sagging. He harassed our guys a little since we were shooting some shots from across the street. Luckily once our director said that we were shooting a short film he left us alone. We got our shots on time, thankfully. Now time to break for lunch.
Most of us went to the caf right next to our next location on campus. In the credits, a joke is going to be Bistro 3 (the caf) catered the event. Our next scene involved the bus stop right our side the caf. It's adjacent to dorms, so naturally some guys start harassing us. They're throwing some really bad ones at us, ones I don't wish to repeat here since they got really R-rated and I like to stay at most PG-13. I was just thinking, "OK shut up guys, you're just being obnoxious." Then they quoted Money Python with "you're mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries." That made me laugh, but glad that the director was able to get them to shut up.
Our next shot took place on a bus. That was fun. All 7 of us and all our equipment just get on one of the city buses and go for a 45 minute ride and shoot. I didn't have any part because I had extra parts in the convenience store. I just ended up talking with a friend while this all happened.
Our final shot took place at our main character's house and his "girlfriend's" house. His house had lots of fun stuff, comic books, comic book DVDs, video game Lego's, action figures, and the like. It was fun. I brought my Naruto key chain, Naruto figure, Trunks action figure, spongebob cereal box prize, and hidden leaf headband. Everything else was brought by either our star, or the guy whose house we were filming at had it all on hand. We shot it at one of our member's house, and he and his roommates have a cat with extra toes. The extra toes look like a thumb on her one paw. It's really interesting.
Like I said, most of my duties for this project were equipment lugging and extra. I carried the tripods, boom mic, and other stuff from location to location. Well location to car, and car to location. The rest of the time I mostly spent time being behind the scenes and bonding with other guys who weren't doing anything at the moment. Fun time.
Now I've been keeping things under secret this whole time. I don't want to spoil anything. Once it gets all edited, I'll be sure to embed it here. But I warn you, it is R material. It has some f-bombs and some strong violence. So strong that it made one of the cameras get blood on it. It might seem like it has more swearing due to the amount of times we ran scenes, but there is swearing. Not something to watch with your kids or parents, unless you guys are cool with that. Well this has been Pokematic signing off and bu-bye.
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