Day 3 & 4 of Shooting Clean Kill: Reshooting

 Hello! I haven't published a blog post on Wednesday and Thursday because of some bad luck and generally being swamped with work. To put it into straight terms, Day 3 was pretty much a wasted day, but Day 4 made up for its shortcomings and progressed the project considerably. What this means for the project was that I missed my self-imposed deadline of having everything done by Thursday. It is what it is, my own disappointment has been pretty deserved, but I can't just throw in the towel and give up. I'll break down what happened on each day, touching upon Day 3's shortcomings and how we learned from that to fix everything on Day 4.

Day 3: A Disasterous Day for Shooting

The Plan

The plan for Wednesday was, in theory, very simple. I would pick up my friends from school, drive over to the gas station we had scouted, and shoot all gas station scenes there, except for the ones that took place at a darker time and the shots that involved the victim walking in front of Martin. I had imagined the whole process wouldn't take more than 2 hours to shoot, taking into account any problems with remembering lines or moving in case we disturbed a gas station customer with our shooting. However, things didn't go according to plan....

The Problems

The first problem with today's shoot had presented itself the night before, when I was watching the news. The reporters were stating that Wednesday would be a very rainy day, especially from between 3pm to 5pm, which was exactly when I planned on filming. I dreaded the weather ruining my filming day, but I shrugged it off, thinking that there's no point in worrying about weather.

    When I awoke the next morning, I received a text from my buddy Wade stating that he had forgotten to bring the mic to school, so I wasn't able to borrow it for the day. While I initially panicked, I proposed driving him to his home after school so that I could pick it up then. This was the agreed plan for most of the day until it wasn't, when he texted me 30 minutes before leaving school, telling me that he wasn't able to go home because of other commitments, and I was therefore unable to get the microphone. This massively stressed me out, since the scenes I was shooting that day were all dialogue-heavy. I lamented the poor planning of the microphone delivery, but continued anyways with my plans, since I had already scheduled a shoot with my two actors.

    As if the first few obstacles weren't enough, the gas station that I had chosen to shoot in was abysmal for our purpose, since it proved to be much busier than I first thought, which pitted us with disgruntled drivers wondering why a few guys had blocked a gas pump, and in general the level of noise was suffocating, I'm not even sure that the presence of the microphone would've changed the fate of the audio quality of the videos we took. Every shot we had was essentially unusable, but we persisted anyways, determined to get some work done.

The Production

    After dealing with all of these problems, Cesar, Blake, and I all were frustrated with the apparent waste of time that we had just invested in. Despite this, we tried to work around the obstacles in our production and so we settled on a solution, which was admittedly tacky and would've been a nightmare to edit, but still allowing us to have something to do that day.

One of the unusable shots I took this accursed day

    After realizing the audio quality was essentially a dumpster fire, what with all the wind, rain, engines running, and speech of other gas station visitors, we came to the idea that maybe we could do the audio separately. And so, they began to act out the script I had provided them with, exaggerating the movements of their lips and expressions since we were essentially shooting a silent film. After this, we got inside my car and did a read-through of the entire script, which was all recorded. The idea was that I could just dub the dialogue over all of the scenes, but in reality this was just a coping mechanism to feel like I didn't waste my day.

Day 4: A Much-Needed Good Day

The Plan

After learning from the train crash that was Wednesday, I was ready to rectify my past mistakes. First, I made sure to text Wade ahead of time to remind him about the microphone (which worked). After that, I checked the weather report, which, much to my pleasure, forecasted clear skies the whole day. And lastly, in an admittedly risky move, decided to move shooting locations to be in a completely different gas station than the ones I had originally scouted, one which was much closer to home, was quieter, and was near Cesar's workplace (in case the shooting took too long).

A BTS look at us conducting a mic check

    An important addition to the group on Thursday was Sebastian, who portrays the Gas Station Victim, tagging along with us, allowing for me to get more of the shots done overall, as well as having an extra hand around to help me manage the microphone and camera (to avoid having the mic show in frame, Sebi would hold it up and crouch out of frame in increasingly uncomfortable positions, which was unexpectedly efficient and hilarious).

 

The Production

 When we showed up at the gas station, immediately there was a notable change in our process for shooting. Now, I wasn't juggling the microphone and camera by myself, we had less environmental pressure from customers and weather, and the mood at the set was generally more relaxed and upbeat, as we were all determined to fix yesterday's shoot, and get as much done as possible. We spent the full two hours shooting each scene with a precision and efficiency I couldn't have dreamed of, now that the actors were familiar with their lines, leading to less takes of each shot.

Sebi's hand makes a cameo in an outtake

In summary, these past two days have been full of learning experiences and progress for this project, and while I did have my moments of self-doubt, I was able to push past them in order to get my work done.  Since I'm going on vacation for the later half of next week, I'll try to squeeze in as many blog posts before I leave. See you next week!