The plan was to shoot at my sister's house and that went ahead as planned but my sister was now being that actress as opposed to the person I had asked, who now had to work. Setting up took a while as it was harder to get a nicely composed shot over a bath with the tripod on the floor, it just wasn't close enough. I decided to put the tripod on the edge of the bath, with one of the legs in the sink. This could have been quite dangerous with my sisters head underwater and me balancing a camera over her head, but I made sure it was all secured onto the tripod and I held it securely and steady.
Lighting was a slight problem as it is rather dark in my sister's bathroom so I had to get my mum to hold the blind up to let the natural light in. I still had to shoot at 1600 ISO but I think the noise will add to the feel of the film, especially after I turn edit it to black and white. With the natural light the image had a more natural feel.
We did a few test runs just so Collette (my sister) could get a feel for what she was doing and how she would do it. I wanted her to be underwater with her eyes open and breathing out to create bubbles, this all sounds quite complex when it's underwater and this is why we had to test it first, one step at a time. First she tried blowing bubbles under water, then just opening her eyes and from there she put it together. When she got the hand of that we went for a test take which went pretty well except she found it uncomfortable when the water shot up her nose. We had a little think of how to stop this happening, had I known it would be an issue I'd have bought some clear nose plugs for water etc. I know for future reference it would be easier and better for the person to have these should I ever need to do it again. The best thing we could come up with was using tissue up the nose to keep the water out or at least reduce the amount. Collette found it much easier this way, it was more comfortable and made it easier to blow bubbles longer. She had to put the tissue far enough up that it wasn't visible on camera, here I was a little unsure of how safe it would be but she assured me it wasn't uncomfortable and tissue does disintegrate in water so we went ahead with it.
At this point it was going really well but I thought there wasn't enough bubbles to distort her face. I did a take with no bubbles to give me the option of not bothering with that idea or to overlay bubbles later. Then the idea of creating ripples in the water and splashing came about which would hopefully further distort the face due to the movement of the water. I needed someone to do this as Collette was focussing on what she needed to do and I was securing the camera so I removed the blind to free up my mum and had her create the ripples while Collette blew bubbles underwater. This idea was most effective and I was really happy with the outcome, it looked great, the face comes in and out of distortion. We did a few takes of this so I have options with the water movement and I also changed the frame rate from 25fps to 50fps so I could see how it looking in editing and had it as an option. The day was really successful and the footage is great, I think it's going to fit well with the other scenes and will have the desired effect since it came out as I had hoped. The rest of the film still has to be shot, since I have a full week we decided to shoot the following Sunday which is the 26th. I intend to shoot all the other scenes as they shouldn't take long and hopefully we will have time to experiment with other ideas that have been floating around in my head.
No comments:
Post a Comment