Production

March 19, 2022

Production

In this post, I'm going to give a run down of all things filming! This will be a summary of everything that happened in production of The Reid Technique.

Day 1

Our first day of filming was Thursday, March 17th 2022. At around 9:45 a.m., Clara and I made our way over to Beacon TV Studios to meet with Jim in their Shortcuts department. There, Shortcuts allowed us to rent out camera and mic equipment after DMing them on Instagram. We rented out a Canon 4k camera, a tripod, a shotgun mic, and a boom pole! We learned how to use all of the equipment while we were there and Jim was super helpful in showing us everything. Thank you Jim and Shortcuts!

After that, we texted the two other actors in our film, Mia Batista and Sabrina Perez to meet us at our shooting location. By the time we got there it was around 11:30 p.m. We walked into the library with all of our equipment and asked to sign out the conference room we wanted to use. The lady at the front desk told us that someone was currently occupying the room so we had to wait for their time to be up. What can I say? That's showbiz! To ensure that we won't wasting anytime while we waited for the room to be available, we got ready in hair and makeup in addition to getting some other still shots we wanted to use in our introduction. These included typing on a computer, grabbing a notepad, writing on a dry erase board, etc. Around 12:45 p.m. the conference room we wanted to use became available so we went in and set up the room. There were four tables pushed together but we only needed to use two of them in addition to three chairs. We only used half of the room for filming to make the setting look more tight and claustrophobic, as an interrogation room should be. Once we set up the furniture how we wanted it, the camera, and the boom mic, it was time to start filming. We had matched our script up with our storyboard so we knew which shots included which dialogue and we went from there. On the first day due to some conflicts in schedules, we all really weren't able to film for that long but we did get about 5 shots before wrapping.

Day 2

Our second day of filming was Friday, March 18th 2022. Since the conference rooms at the library are first come, first serve, we could not make the same mistake as yesterday so we had to get there as soon as the library opened, 10:00 a.m. sharp. Clara and I got there first with all of our equipment and successfully signed out the room we wanted to use! Soon enough, Sabrina got to set and we began filming all of the shots that just required her. When Mia got here, we began filming the scenes with the two of us and then all three of us. Luckily all three of us weren't in many scenes together at the same time, so there was always someone who could operate the boom mic while we were shooting. Unlike the first day, filming was surprisingly easy and it did not take much to get everything we needed to get. Since we were running good on time, we reshot everything from the day before as well just to ensure complete consistency in the shots so everything looked the same. We filmed each angle at a time rather than filming chronologically in order to save time from moving the camera back and forth. After around 3 hours we wrapped the interrogation scene and had to go film the "hallway scene" chronologically taking place before the interrogation scene. Our intention was to film in the Weston Regional Community Center hallway, like I had discussed in previous blogs but just to save time, we changed the location to another area of the Weston Branch Library. There was a multipurpose room that had a hallway pretty close to perfect that we filmed at. Our biggest issue was figuring out the blocking of the scene since the layout of the room was different from what we had planned, but after figuring it out, everything ran very smoothly. After a couple takes of this scene, we wrapped filming at the library and only had to get one more shot. We drove to the Weston Police Department and got an establishing shot of the building's exterior. This was to explain to our audience where the interior shots of our film are supposedly. After getting that shot we were 100% done! YAYYYYYYYY! We uploaded all of the content onto a flash drive to protect our work and began looking through all of our footage, making sure all audio and visual aspects were perfect, and putting it all in the correct order. Here are some behind the scenes photos that I like from both days of filming: