First day of filming!

    In this blog post, I will detail our first day of filming our movie project! Despite only being the first part of the film, a lot of work and factors went into the production.

    We decided to meet up in an empty parking lot of some office building. Meeting up around 6:30 gave us enough daylight to explore the environment and find out what we could work with. The location was perfect for the setting, as the film would start off with the protagonist leaving an office building after work. We filmed when it became night time to match the mood and setting of the film. Luckily for us, the parking lot was very vacant and was perfect so that there were no distractions when it came to filming. The only obstacle was that there were still people around the entrance of the building, preventing us from getting a good angle of the building itself. Luckily for us, they eventually walked out of frame and we filmed from an angle that cuts them out of focus.

    This is the protagonist of the film being played by Daniel Yanes. As seen, his character wears fairly bland business casual and is supposed to look like your average office worker.

    This is me, the antagonist. In contrast to the main character, this character that I'm playing is ominous and suspicious since the whole point is to look like a stalker and stay hidden in cover of darkness. The photo above makes it look less threatening, but in the darkness of the night it's a lot more convincing.  

    The image above is the office building we filmed at. The process of filming was a lot quicker than I expected but we took multiple approaches to how we wanted to film our introduction. We had contemplated where to start off the film, as we aimed to introduce the protagonist and their main environment without the people around the location showing up in the footage. We eventually settled with the very edge of the building, using handheld motion in our footage to make it appear as if the camera was a POV shot of the stalker. This is made obvious with the audio of heavy breathing and bushes shaking as the camera changes position to follow the protagonist as he walks out of the office building. We shot this introduction a few times until we were content with what we had.

    We moved onto the next scene, which swaps to an over the shoulder shot of the protagonist as he walks to his car. We made good use of the camera falling behind the darkness of a tree so we can make a transition between the two scenes with a fade transition. This was fairly simple to film, the only difficult part was trying to have the audio of the camera-man's footsteps break the immersion. We had this scene recorded, but we weren't content with it since we would have trouble transitioning to the next scene with a car. We changed this scene to include the protagonist walking to getting into their car and driving off, and basically using tracking movement so that the transition could be done in one take. 

    With a little more technical difficulties, we eventually got it down and transitioned to the next and final scene of that day. This scene was one of the easiest to take since all we had to do was film one car following the next. The only challenge in this is that I had to hold the camera while Sofia, the original cameraman, was driving the car. We manage to make it convincing enough to look like I was actually driving, so all was well in the end of this scene.