Filming Blog: The First Half

   

Hello Cambridge people! Today we started filming our movie introduction. We went to our local Barnes and Noble after school and set up in a small corner in the second floor. We had our star actor, Amelie, do her makeup while the rest of us wrote down the shots we would need for the film. First, we had Amelie walk slowly through the shelves. The first take was way too slow, and the camera was moving around too much. However, we discovered the wonders of cinematic mode on Samantha's camera, which allowed us to remove the motion on the camera and make the shot feel like it was on a dolly. The second take was much better, especially since Amelie was getting into character as a crazy person. The next shot was from across the floor of her once again walking which was shot by Samantha. We had a few takes, but quickly ran into the problem of other people in the shot, since we were not alone in the store. We were not entirely happy with the takes, but since the floor was starting to crowd, we couldn't get a better one. 

    The next thing we had to film was Amelie taking a seat in our corner of the book store. We also had trouble with this, because there was a bathroom behind her so we didn't want to get the shot of her coming towards the camera, as we had originally planned. Instead, we decided to do a bird's eye view shot of her coming into frame. The only problem was that none of us were tall enough to reach over the bookshelf to get the proper angle. We had to find a stool and even then only Lilly, the tallest of us, was barely able to get the shot. We then decided to record the background dialogue that we had written down to get creepier and creepier as it goes on. The dialogue starts fairly normal, with two people talking about The Tell Tale Heart, but the hidden meaning here is that our story and The Tell Tale Heart are both about someone going insane. There is also a line where someone praises the ideas written in A Modest Proposal, which is a satirical essay about how people should eat Irish children to solve the hunger crisis and the orphan crisis. There was also a reference to The Yellow Wallpaper, also about someone going insane, before the dialogue falls into gibberish. Me and Lilly read the lines with some difficulty, because Lilly thought a lot of the script was funny. In fairness, I was writing how people in books talk, not how people actually talk, which made for some weird parts (like someone saying dude, a word none of us would ever use in real life). After this, we had to go because the store was closing, but we'll hopefully finish recording soon!