TV News - Shoot Day

Having booked my train for 9am, to be at Gravesend for 10am, I was ready for a long day ahead of me. Kids, bloody kids had already disrupted the shoot day, holding me back atleast 30 minutes due to causing disruption on the train, the filming hadn't even begun yet but we were behind on our shoot schedule due to this, thankfully other members were late too so it didn't feel like all the weight was on me.

We adapted to this and planned to have everything ready to be shot at Alex's sisters outhouse by 11am, unfortunately we got side tracked and had several things to purchase for production purposes (Fry up scene). We eventually got there at around 1pm, and began to shoot the first scene in which I was presenting, I found it hard and increasingly pressured with each take as inevitably mistakes would be made and I found myself putting even more pressure on. I managed to learn most of the script, enough so that I could piece to the camera an eventually be able to look at the script as then we could cut out the bits where i'm not looking down the throat of the camera. 

We had got through half of the day unscathed, slowly but surely working our way through the script, trying to get as much coverage and shots as possible so that when we came back to the edit we had a vast amount of varying footage to play with. We were following the script but now and again go off it to do some improvisation like the intro, and a certain scene with the lemon, but mostly sticking to the script throughout. 

As the day got later, and my stomachs got hungrier, stress began to sink in and we just wanted to get this done and wrapped. We were put on hold as to think of a way to get the dogs attention for one of our shots, when suddenly Alex just started screaming at the dog, an boy did it work, we didn't have a clue what was going on until we saw the camera rolling. We ended the day with pizza freshly baked by Alex's mum. Nice.

What worked? 

I felt on the day everyone pulled their weight, we had great luck with Alex's friend being so cooperative and positive throughout the process, that made everything that much easier. I believed we got all the shots we wanted, we weren't rushed at Alex's house for time so we had ample time to think through fully on how to create the best possible shot and way of telling the sequence. What also worked nicely was the metaphor sequence, even though we didn't have a vast amount of material, we did well with what we had.

What didn't work/ could be improved?
Well with everything going to smoothly on the day there were only a small number of things that I could realistically flag up. One that could definitely do with some improving is time keeping, making sure we stick to the schedule as we had some crew needing to leave to go to work and if we had all been on time and ready/prepared, we could have avoided those situations. Another one potentially, bringing up creativity to the game, and this comes in to preparation of a shoot, writing up more potential concepts and creative gags on screen to play out. I felt we lacked at some points a real creative point, or not lacked, but it just took a lot longer than it should of, and especially when we're on shoot I felt like we should of had those concepts/ideas down and ready to test. Maybe that could be a point to establish in the next unit, to test out more ideas first to see if they actually work. Also wishing we got more coverage of the metaphor sequence, we didn't have much to play around for that sequence and I felt that was a shame. 

Overall I thought the day went to plan by 95%, productivity levels were sky high and morale never stooped lower than 110%. We worked creatively together and brought the best out in one another on the day and managed to get everything done on the script, so I couldn't of been happier. I think for next time if we can just mange our time a bit better we'd be overall a bit more efficient but apart from that it was a great shoot day.