Filming - Day 1 and Day 2

After talking to Andy, he managed to book out some equipment and studio 3 for us. Even though studio 3 is not the ideal studio for us as it does not have the lighting set up that we need. As our actor was not available for today, we are using the studio to shoot all the cards (limbs) that we will need to comp into all the shots. We had Holly come in to help us out with special effect makeup. We needed makeup to make it look like severed limbs as a time saver to do it with practical effects rather than CG.

Here is an example of the make-up that was done. This is Amy that volunteered to be a decapitated head.

As I am the DIT and helping out with lights and green screen, I spent the whole day in the TV studio helping out, making sure everything is done right. We got in half of the course in to film their arms and legs, I went around recruiting animators to come in for 10 min so that they could have a cameo in the film. The footage looked really good and should be easy to comp together later. The special effect makeup really helped us with edges and looked amazing on camera, the lighting hit it just right to make it look real.

Here we are testing the lighting and making sure the green screen will be easy

to extract.

Day 2 of filming.

Fletcher (our actor) was available and we could start to shoot the actual footage. We had some issues ( as we always have) the glide cam that we needed to get the right dolly movement was booked out and we had to use and old version of it. This requires the use of weights and extreme caution when you film. The movement we need is a pan sideways and then down, we tried loads of takes, but the footage was un-usable as it is too shaky. We tried a few different solutions that we thought might work , by adding more weight, putting it on a wheely chair. None of this worked and we were not able to shoot the panning shots, so we are going to leave them until next Saturday.

Here is the full set up in studio 3, where we shot all the cards (limbs) that will be composited into the jars.

The actor is wearing glasses in the film, which proved difficult as it reflected light at the camera. I remembered watching a breakdown and behind the scenes of Harry Potter, where they had the same issue. The way they solved it was to pop out the glasses and then digitally insert them later down the pipeline. I suggested this as a fix and it worked perfectly.