FMP 'Endure' shooting day 1

This was the first day of actual shooting with all actors present and all crew attending, which included Alex as director, me as co-director and co-lighting and sound engineer, Jordan Gott as main camera operator (although we all had some time on camera) and the other co-lighting and sound engineer, while Christi was in charge of make-up and production stills. We began the day preparing the locations, we would need to shoot the bedroom, hallway, kitchen and outside scenes with the basement scenes to be filmed on Sunday. We began by dressing the bedroom with various props and items, such as empty beer cans and pizza boxes in order to better mirror the character. After doing that and as we waited for the actors and actress to arrive we split the roles up more evenly and decided amongst ourselves who would be filming which scenes, I was given the responsibility of shooting the bedroom scene, I knew this would be a challenge but was happy for the chance to improve my camera operating skills. Jordan was given the job of filming the hallway and kitchen scenes, whilst Alex would be responsible for the outside scenes.

The actors arrived and we allowed them to begin practicing the bedroom scene after Christi applied makeup to Philip in order to make look like he'd been in a fight (busted lip), whilst they were doing that I began to set up the camera, whilst I was doing this Jordan happened upon a problem with sound equipment, everything was echoing and didn't sound natural at all, we quickly rectified this with a change in positioning for the mic and the use of a boom pole to get in closer to the actors. Once I had selected an appropriate camera angle for the wide shot we began filming, initially I had feared that the drastic change in light during this scene would compromise the exposure however I switched the camera to automatic and did a test run, this looked perfectly natural in terms of how the lighting switched so I stuck to automatic. After getting the shots we needed with the tripod I wanted to switch to the fig rig as I though this would suit the scene much better, since we needed at least a small bit of instability to make it seem a bit more gritty and edgy.

The bedroom scenes took all morning, by which time Peter Quinn and George had arrived which meant we could get on with shooting the hallway scene involving the stepdad (Peter) and Tom (Philip) wherein they have an argument. Jordan was on camera for this section and it proved much more difficult than we anticipated, as after we had secured the entire conversation from multiple angles each of the actors began having laughing fits, this lasted for far longer than it should have done and even began to spread to the crew, this meant after trying for at least an extra forty minutes to get the last shots, we had to take a break in order for the actors to calm down. Securing the last shots then became much easier and we filmed them without incident, however we knew that we wouldn't have much time for the rest of the shots, thus we postponed the outside shots until Sunday. This was one of few problems we encountered that had to be rectified quickly in order for us to stay roughly on track. We had just enough time to secure the shots in the living room, wherein Tom changes the channel whilst Luke is playing on the Xbox, this whole scene was completed quickly and didn't present any problems like the last scene did.

The only other major problem we encountered which also hindered filming greatly was the fact that Christi went home much earlier than everyone else, shortly after she left Philip accidentally ate the makeup on his lip, which we tried desperately to replace but had no luck. This meant that we definitely couldn't continue filming as there was no way we could quickly produce a convincing replacement for the makeup without Christi. We also began to lose light fast which made shooting the outside scenes successfully quite impossible in the time frame we had. There was also a minor issue we spotted with continuity in the hallway scene, whilst we were having a break to try and subside all the laughing someone placed a plastic bottle on a cupboard behind where the actors stand, unfortunately we didn't realise it was in shot until it was too late and the actors were ready to leave, we can avoid this in future by being more vigilante in regards to the items around set.