Filming Blog: Hannah's House

As I previously stated in the recent blog, Hannah and I had to delay the second day of filming due to camera issues. Before Hannah and I could finish filming scenes 7 to 9, the camera died thus, preventing further filming. The reason why the third filming day was at Hannah's house because of our actresses scheduling. During this week, one of the actresses was out of town. Since we need both actresses, we had to post-pone another filming day. Even though the spies actresses were unavailable, I was able to film my scenes.

Before I went over to Hannah's house, I gathered my props: black headphones and my computer, and my costume: a black tank top, khaki cardigan, and glasses. Once I arrived at Hannah's house, I began to help Hannah with set design. Although most of the set was organized, there were still crucial elements that were missing such as the computers. During the Pre-Production process, Hannah and I forgot to plan the images on the computer during the Monitor's scenes. We only planned to use two computers during these scenes. I suggested having one computer display a certain area of the park that shows the spies are not in position while the other computer will have the layout of the park. This caused me to create the format of the park on the word document while we waited for footage to be dumped onto Hannah's computer. Also, I edited the picture of a briefcase to display the words "Motivation", to help develop suspense for the audience.

On the third day of filming, my major role was as an actress. Since the planning stages, I was cast as the Monitor, the person who oversees the spies' operation. Even though my character is typing on her computer and monitoring the screens, it was a difficult process because my scenes were more focused on the dialogue than the action. In my scenes, I had to act aggressive, sarcastic, annoyed, serious and disappointed as I "watched" the spies fail at being spies. The challenging part was conveying these emotions because I have no acting experiences and I am camera shy. Eventually, I recorded all my scenes and dialogue.

Throughout the filming day, I maintained my role as an organizer. Between the scenes, I would refer to the storyboard, sound script and the shooting script to ensure all the dialogue and the shots were filmed. There were some angles and shots Hannah and I had to change. Due to the position of the desk, it was difficult to film a medium close up of me because of my short stature. This caused the filming to be shot from the side angle at a medium close up. In addition to the organizer, I did direct Scene 10. Although Hannah filmed all the necessary footage, I felt something was missing as Hannah and I reviewed the footage. This caused me to direct the camerawoman Hannah and the Kidnapper to produce a logical and suspenseful kidnapping scene. For instance, I directed to Hannah to film a close up of the Kidnapper holding their wooden stick and a long shot of the Kidnapper walking towards me. I felt the switching of perspectives it would add more suspense to our action movie.

After this filming day, Hannah and I have one more production day.


(This is a picture of me acting as the Monitor.)