Filming Blog

     During the filming process I went outside of the class room with my group and went to building 21. I went to building twenty-one in order to get one of my group mates and the product that we were going to use, Pure Life water, so that we can actually start filming. After getting my group mate we went to the second floor of building five to the end by the comm tech class room. We chose that setting first because of the Flying L sign behind it. We were going to have a cheer leader act like she was tired and needed to drink the pure life water. We did not get to do this part because setting up the tripod took such a long time.  The reason the tripod set up took so long was because I had to go back to the class for an SD card. I went back for an SD card because I thought that someone in our group brought it, but it turns out I was wrong. After getting the SD card we tried for about 5 minutes to get the camera on the tripod before realizing that the screw that goes under the camera and into the tripod was missing. I had to go back in the class room to get the piece to connect the tripod and camera.
      We were about to record the scene when we seen that we only had 45 minutes left, so we decided to come back to this scene the next day of filming. We decided to do the establishing shot and the ending shot first.We moved locations to the senior patio in the middle of the flying L. We set up the camera on the bench in front of the flying L and raised it to as high as we could in order to achieve the high angle. I then filled up a big water bottle container and recorded us splashing the water on the L. It took forever to get the bottle filled because it wouldn’t fit in the bathroom sink. I had to take the cap off the bottle and fill that with water and then pour it into the water bottle container. We tried to get the shot of us splashing the water on the L without our bodies in it, which caused us to take record multiple times because our bodies kept getting caught up in the recording.About 3 or 4 recordings and bottle fill ups later we finally got the shot right. We knew we got the shot right by checking the footage on the camera.
     We then moved on to the establishing shot. The establishing shot did not take as much time as the last shot did. One of my group mates zoomed the camera into the sun and then went from the sun to the top of the building with the words that said “strong and true, white and blue”, then down into the actual senior patio, where you could see students working, and then finally to the Flying L symbol in the middle of the senior patio. We did not plan for the students to be in the senior patio while we were filming, but I told my group mates that it would be a good idea to incorporate them into the shot because it shows a normal school setting with kids instead of something that was planned. They agreed with this because we want our commercial to look as real as possible when it comes to the scenes and to not look like it was shot with a green screen behind it. By the time we finished the establishing shot it was time for us to go. So I packed up everything while my group mates checked to make sure all of the footage was right and on the way walking back to the class one of my group mates deleted a video of us splashing the water off the camera. I didn’t think that it was the one that took us ages to get right and neither did my group mate, but when we got to the class we could not find the video while dumping. We did have another video of water being splashed on the L without our bodies in it, but the one we chose originally was way better and did not too much care for that one. We decided as a group that we will try to film it again the next day of filming after getting the rest of our scenes done, but if not we could just use the scene we already have or put pure-life water bottles into the L and record it that way.