Filming

Today Stephanie and I completed our filming. Stephanie forgot to bring her blue tank top that we decided for her costume so she wore a light blue t-shirt. We also discovered that we had less time to film than we anticipated. After receiving our equipment, we went to the senior patio to record Stephanie’s scenes. Originally, on our film schedule we planned to film my scenes on the track field in case it rained later on in our film process, but we had to film Stephanie’s first because we only had limited time there. We first filmed Stephanie doing rhythmic gymnastics and after we filmed a medium close up of her drinking a Gatorade. After we finished filming those two scenes, our camera died and we had to go exchange it for a new one. We then moved onto our high-five scene and close up of the drinks which we filmed at the big staircase of building five. Before filming the two scenes, we ran into another technical difficulty. We couldn’t eject the SD card so we could transfer it into the new camera. We had to ask our teacher for assistance and eventually we got it out.

In total, Stephanie and I brought seven Gatorade bottles. We ended up only using the blue and white Gatorades, though we planned to use those two colors and the purple Gatorades, because we felt that the purple Gatorade didn’t match the aesthetic of the other ones. My scenes, which were the last two shots we needed to film, were filmed on the track field. First, we recorded me running toward the camera at eye level. While filming the running scene, I proposed the idea that we should do a scene where I’m running but the camera is behind me. Stephanie agreed with the idea. For our commercial, we were required to include either a tilt or a pan, so we decided that we would make this new scene include a tilt. I was very tired from all the running I had to do in different takes and the heat outside was also draining. Stephanie mentioned that it would make the next scene we filmed, which was the shot of me drinking a Gatorade, look more natural and realistic since I was actually thirsty. We had to do a couple retakes because I kept accidentally spilling Gatorade on myself because I was actually drinking the beverage.

We had extra time to film so we did retakes of Stephanie’s scenes on the track field. We redid her drinking scene first. Stephanie sat close to the bottom of the track field’s bleachers while I recorded near the top of the bleachers from a high angle. We then did retakes of her rhythmic gymnastics scene in a grassy area in close proximity to the track field. I thought it would be a good idea to get multiple takes of her doing various tricks with her rhythmic gymnastics ball. Her first trick was her throwing her ball in the air, doing a spin, and then catching the ball. Her second one was her rolling the ball down her back and catching it. Her last trick was a combination of the previous two where threw the ball, did a spin, catch the ball, roll it down her back, and catch it from behind. We went back to the classroom to dump our footage onto a desktop. We had trouble locating our footage on our SD card because there was also another group’s footage on there, but with the assistance of a fellow classmate we successfully transferred our footage.