Brainstorm:
initially we knew we wanted to do a thriller/murder mystery, above are the early brainstorms and plot drafts which we did together.
leading up to filming, i was in charge of the camera battery and all 5 costumes for our actors. this included shoes, ties, jewellery, the lot.
our first filming session went about as poorly as it possibly could. we did have a storyboard, but no script or clear direction. this ended up with us essentially wasting a bunch of time, especially since we never ended up using ANY of that footage (it was un-useable).
heres the first storyboard:
moving forward, we redid our storyboard and i was in charge of creating a script. we didnt want a repeat of what happened last time.
heres the updated storyboard:
a lot of the character design and mise en scene was also changed. this time my groupmate also made some character moodboards to try and convey the characters’ personality better.
please forgive the fact that half of these dont have names, it was before we had fully decided on what we were going to call our cast.
Going into our first proper filming session, all went surprisingly well. we got a whole heap done and I was rather happy with the result. although, as usual, the camera didnt work. it wasnt a battery thing, rather the actual gear itself broke – which sounds about right haha. this resulted in us using about 4 different phones to record over the night (since it was late, everyones phones were near dead, so we had to switch and swap)
Where the real issues start to arise is the dreadful organisation of the second filming. now you’ll have to forgive me again, since that was a misleading statement, we actually tried our very best to gather up all 4 actors (not including me and my groupmate) but exam season was upon us, and people have jobs and responsibilities. this ended up with the whole group trying to find a date, finding one far off in the future, agreeing upon it, and cancelling at the last minute. unsurprisingly, this process was infuriating, but i never lost my cool.
in the end, we couldnt get one of our main actors to show up again, so we had to improvise by switching up some of the roles in a way that still made sense with the plot. although the one thing we couldnt get was a huge gap in the middle of the movie which we absolutely HAD to have the aforementioned actor in. this resulted in a crucial section of filming that was really impactful to the plot being missed. this lead us to try and find a last minute solution by having two of our actors voice over a panning shot of the house to try and fill the gap in footage. i really wasnt happy with this at all but its better than nothing i suppose.