SHOOT DAY 1

SETTING UP THE PLACe

Tarawish and I went to Ashar’s place and with Ashar’s help, emptied the entire bag which had the props in it. First thing we did was, we emptied the entire bag of trash that I had got(which included food packets, drink cans, cigarette packs, cigarette ash) and we scattered it all around the room. We set the duvet as a bed for my character, in the corner of the room. We found a place for some alcohol bottles to keep, a cheap-CRT Television and a table where he would usually keep his entire drug material on. I set the table right in the center of the room because it had to be used in a 360 shot, where the character is doing all kinds of drugs and the camera roams around him in circles, which will be later sped up in post to give a timelapse look. Last thing we did was put on the posters we had got, on the wall.
THIS IS WHAT MY SET LOOKED LIKE:

MAKEUP AND COSTUMES

I hold no proficiency in the field of make up art but I had to try my best. I had borrowed some foundation and eye shadow colours from my mother. I combined purple and blue eye shadows and applied them under my actor’s eyes. The foundation was used on his entire face so he looks good for the camera and his skin tones are evened out. For the costumes however, I chose to go simple. I gave him plain coloured tee-shirts and asked him to change it to a different one every few scenes later so the video looks like its a journey of a character and not a one-day story.

camera SETTINGS

I used pretty much the same settings throughout the shoot. Both my cameras(Sony a6000 and Canon 600D) were kept on 1/50th shutter speed and 24 frames per second. I changed the ISO according to the lighting situation. The canon was used only for close-ups and was set to f/1.8 aperture while my sony camera was set to 16 and 24 milimeters and f/3.5 and f/4.5 aperture throughout the shoot.
For the GoPro, I kept it on flat coloured profile so it would be easy to colour grade the footage later on, and I set the resolution on 2.7k, 24fps, 1/50th shutter speed.

ACTING

Working with Tarawish was not easy. In a lot of takes, his inexperience in the acting field was clearly evident. We did not have time to rehearse since we had to get all the daylight shots in one day and time was running out. I just kept shooting more and more takes until I felt that one take was exactly how I needed. In some scenes, it was the very first take, and in the others, it was the 10th or 11th.

COVERAGE

I tried my best to have every shot taken from multiple angles just like how I noted down in my shot list. The usage of two cameras instead of one helped us a lot in this. The extra tripod also helped a lot. I placed the cameras simultaneously together in a way that they would not appear in the other camera’s shot, instead of taking seperate takes and working towards the right time with each shot for each camera angle.

I hid the other camera in such a way that it could look disguised as a part of the trash that is scattered all over the room.

caMERA MOVEMENT

Something unexpected happen. I did not feel the need to use the steadicam at all during the shoot, due to the hassle of trying to balance it first according to the camera’s weight and then using it while holding a camera. Instead, I had an instant thought that I could just use handheld movement since shaky, uncontrollable movement would actually suit the story due to the topic’s theme.

LIGHTING

We worked with ambient lights as much as we could, and used the coloured light bulbs for the scenes in which I wanted to have a neon themed look. We waited for the sunset and then did the scenes with the coloured lights. However, there were some scenes where I wanted a normal light but since we didn’t have them after sunset, Ashar and I used our phones’ flashlights on brightest settings. I put some tissue paper on top of the lights to soften them. That is something I had to improvise on shoot.