It's filming time!!

     Today was filming day! FINALLY all my actors were available to film! Luckily, school wasn't an issue today since all my actors were able to come at the same time after school and they were so easy to work with it was so quick! Jumping into filming from weeks and weeks of planning was honestly a bit stressful. Thankfully, my actors made it so much easier. They all gave me their input on some of the acting choices and really made the characters their own.

    My actors also made the whole process super quick since all of them do theatre outside of this film. They really knew how to understand the characters and also memorize their lines. Of course, we still had some slip ups here and there, but it made the whole filming process a lot more bearable. Not saying I hated it, but it took a lot of stress off me since they made it feel more like a hangout with my friends while still taking it seriously.

Video of one of our outtakes

    To illustrate what the day of filming looked like, we started with getting everyone in costume and makeup if needed. My sister was able to do the Figment's makeup flawlessly and I was super impressed with the end results. We filmed Charles' scene with Jackson first, which really helped me get the hang of things. Then we took a quick break and moved outside for the next scene with the rest of the characters. This scene took the longest since it was easy to mess up with a larger group of people. Along with some of the actors mess-ups, I often would stop recording before we were finished with the sequence of lines, which made me realize I should probably wait until a large gap of silence to stop filming. 

    Then, we went back into my room to film the final scene in the opening, which is when my technical director had the idea to make all the lights in the room red. Immediately I fell in love with this idea, and changed all of the light's colors. This scene took SO. MANY. TRIES. When I say that, I mean it. It is totally not his fault, but the actor playing the Figment literally could not take off the piece of tape without gloves. We retried this over and over until we finally got it right, but after that, we finished filming!

    I think I really learned a lot from filming today, and I can't wait to apply it more in future projects.