Director's Diary - Part 3: Lucky Number Three

On day three we had to film the most difficult scene in the film. It was a short tracking shot that was really hard to do for the cameraman as he had to go from a static position for some short lines of dialog to a free walk through the room following the protagonist out the door and around the corner with the camera in hand, all whilst regulating the focus at certain moments. It certainly wasn't looking "professional" in the end but for our purposes I thought it was fantastic. I was surprised of how good we got it.

We began finishing the last dialogue scenes from other perspectives. Our lead actor would do it in smaller bits than we did it with our lead actress the day before. So we also shot a lot more takes. But he was really good to work with and did respond really well to our instructions. What impressed me with him was that he could repeat something he had done before the very same way in the next take(s). A good skill that made things easy.

Another challenge was two wide angle shots from below the ceiling in two corners of the room since there was a whole lot of stuff in the room - and since it wasn't our room we couldn't just throw out all the shelfs, books, boxes and so on. So how could we got the camera up there in a solid position? The first solution we had wasn't actually solid at all. We put a chair on the bed that was there in that corner and put the camera tripod with its three bases ...

Since we weren't shooting in controlled environment we also had difficulties with the people living next door. Sometimes we would shoot in the hallway when other people were just leaving their rooms and consequently ruining the shot. Later that day someone turned up loud music so we had to wait unless we wanted some heavy metal noise on our audio tracks. But since they did us a great favor of letting us shoot there at all we didn't want to bother them all the time or insist on not playing music the whole day and stuff like that.

Then we moved on to shoot all the rest of the plot with the protagonist. We finished everything with him in the frame which was really great since he told us in the morning that he probably wouldn't be available tomorrow anymore. Since it's my job to coordinate the things I really hope I haven't forgotten anything important to shoot. We really have done a lot of work today. It's also nice to see how much more efficient compared to the first one. It was a lot more focused, a lot better prepared and just more experienced. Even in those three days, I think we learned quite a lot.