Pre-Production of Film Opening

 

Blog Post: Pre-Production and Mise-en-Scene of your Film Opening

Scheduling:

We tried to schedule our first filming day with everyone in our group present, but sadly something came up for Jacquie, so it was just me, Sydney, and Dereck. This was not a major problem, because Jacquie wasn't an actor or a cinematographer, so we could shoot without her. But because she was our planned editor, we needed her opinion for some scenes, we just decided without her.

Location Scouting:

We decided on the Walk for our location because of the variety of fountains that we could choose from as well as various different store fronts that we could use in our project.

After viewing all the options of fountains at the walk, we choose this fountain because of the lighting, and the store fronts that decorated the scene well.

We walked around a lot, Sydney and Dereck took this video while I was on the phone.

When we refilm, we plan to still use the same locations

This smoothie shop caused us some problems because they said we were not allowed to film the counters, so we had to rearrange our shot list to accommodate the scene without filming the front counters of the establishment

Costuming:

We were trying to give Claire a clean girl look. Which is an easy style to pull off for people of low class, we added in sweatpants to keep the idea of lower class. And you can't tell in the photo, but the shirt has a dirt stain, that was meant to show she is not a financial well off as she tries to appear.

But when we refilm, we plan to change her outfit to look baggier, because we didn't think this outfit made her look poor enough.

Set Design:

We didn't really do too much set design. In Trader Joes we planned to hide some items to make it appear as if the groceries she was looking for were out of stock.

As well as using the table in the smoothie shop to better display Claire's poor status by being a background to the dollars and coins she would later use to by the drink.

Technical Preparation:

Before filming, everybody at the location did a test of the video quality of their phone camera, so we could find the best phone to use. That ended up being Sydney's phones, it had the clearest quality out of all of ours. Furthermore, we tested the lighting a lot in our first scene at the fountain. Because that scene was outside, we had a little trouble getting the lighting correct, which was why it was hard to get a wide shot in at the angle we wanted. So, instead we went with medium and close up shots.

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Thank you for reading :)