Filming 17/12/13

On Tuesday 17th November I had my second, and hopefully final, shoot with actors. For this shoot I only had Charlie, playing Arbogast, as the few shots in which Norma Bates is present there was no need to reshoot.

Before we started filming Charlie and I reviewed the footage so far, with Charlie having some valuable pointers, such as the way that he fell down the stairs not looking good enough, and so we made plans on how to change this.

We began with the exterior shots, when Arbogast walks up to the house, which we thought was going to be tricky at first as it was raining slightly and so we thought that this would ruin the shot, however when we tested the shot we found that the image was fine. Due to the sun going down quite early we did not have to wait long for darkness to fall.

What was good about it being so dark was the lights from the lamp posts on the street as this added to the noir feeling, as the yellow light from the streetlights gives the shot a shadowy and melancholy feel. This also gave it a very low-key lighting look.

These exterior shots were easy to complete and were completed by the time the rain really started to hammer down. So we moved on to re-shooting some of the interior shots, such as the point at which Arbogast falls down the stairs. We changed this by having the camera, operated by myself, running down towards Charlie as he fell backwards, this is a slightly modernised version of the way the original fall happened, with the camera staying at the same distance from Arbogast as they travel down the stairs, however for this the camera has a much more jerky feel to it, and a lot faster (as after looking at the original fall we believe it is too slow to realistically be a man falling down a flight of stairs) and in my eyes almost gives the audience a feeling of being inside "Norma" Bates head as she attacks the detective.

All in all this has concluded the production stage of the scene, meaning that I can move on to getting everything completed in post-production, including colour grading and timeline editing. I am happy with the footage that was both captured on this shoot and previous filming sessions and will be able to complete the project very soon, there is a chance that within the post-production stage I find there to be something wrong, such as a continuity error which I should be able to overcome through various editing software processes, for example if the lighting changes from one shot to the next colour grading should be able to fix such a problem.