After the pre-production we did on 'Lights' over the easter break, we came back after easter ready to finish it. We had everything in place, me, John and Mikey went out the day before and bought everything we needed, including; Bed sheets, Costume and ingredients for fake blood.
On the shoot day we all met at Church square, we had decided to use Lime Crescent as our student accommodation. Dan Whalen was so kind to let us use him room. Which came in handy as our actor for the role of Sam wasn't responding to the call sheet which we sent out, so we decided to use Dan as easy fix. Even though I would prefer not to cast students in our films, Dan was actually quite a good fit for what the character required.
Once all of the cast and crew were ready at church square we moved to our location. Me and John had purchased some black card to black out Dan's windows for the scenes which we were attempting to make look like night. I think this worked reasonably well but if you were looking for it, you may be able to spot it. We set up and I began to work with the actors and run some lines with them. At first I began to get worried as Dan was taking a lot of time to familiarise himself with the lines, I thought we were going to be trying to get this scene all day, but after we practised a few times, he picked it up rather quickly.
After we got the main dialogue scene, we moved onto the scene where Danny finds Sam the next morning. We had cast Gary Davison as Danny, I had worked with him briefly on 'Ya Think'. I was extremely impressed with the amount of research he had done for the character. He had a notebook filled with information about the character, which made my job a lot easier. He really went for it with every take, I would happily work with Gary again.
Next we did what we've done on every shoot for these shorts. Waited for the sun to go down. We needed the cover of darkness for our Exterior shots. Once it was dark we shot a few shots of Danny leaving and arriving from his night out. We got a two shot of Danny and Jack, when Danny lets Jack in and I was a fan of the look Jack gave back to Danny when he thanks him. I look forward to seeing it in the edit. We got a few things on the shoulder rig, this included shots of Danny walking threw the corridors of lime Crescent, I instructed Abby to follow Gary quite wobbly to emphasise his drunken state. We also did another version of this shot where we follow Jack into the building, now this version I asked for Abby to hold it a steady and as straight as possible to really show the contrasts between the two characters.
We also got a shot from the other side of Dans door showing Jack arriving, you could only see his silhouette threw the window, but it made for quite a striking image. At the end of the shoot, when we sent the majority or cast and crew home. Me, Jack and John took the shoulder rig out and shot a few pickups for 'The Hook Man', one was just Jack entering a takeaways and collecting a pizza and the other was the blood splatter on my windscreen for the end of 'The Hook Man'. This shot was fairly difficult, I operated the camera while I told Jack to splatter the blood across the window. On the camera it didn't have the effect I was looking for, So i just simply asked John to pour the rest of the blood all over the front of the car. This looked ten times better, I just hope it works in the edit. Overall I was pretty happy with the shoot for 'Lights'. I do feel like it may be one of the least interesting shorts, but I think it'll be a nice break and bridge between 'Hook Man' and 'The Babysitter'.
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