Friends, this post has been long in the making. Or, rather, the actual post hasn't been, but rather the process the post describes. On Sunday, March 12th, Day 1 of filming for Unpacking happened.
A few things complicated it. First of all, I was with two of my friends from Orlando, Max and Ellie; they kindly agreed to help out on the day of filming, which was a huge help I hadn't anticipated, since- well- they live in Orlando. I've worked with both of them before on individual projects across lots of mediums, but never film. Second of all, we started filming in the afternoon, around 3 pm; and as the sun set, we had to worry about losing natural daylight.
Max (left), assistant cinematographer; Ellie (right), assistant producer
Max (left); Ellie (top); Bia (right), actor for Christine; Clover (bottom), me!
I used Bia's tripod, which she was kind enough to lend me; Max, however, had to use it as a monopod a lot of the time to get the handheld movement I wanted in a lot of my shots. I think it really helped as a stabilizer, though.
Over the course of filming, we did a lot of rehearsal with the camera rolling so that we could get used to it, while also getting Max used to the specific style of handheld motion needed to frame each shot. I also shot a lot of vlog-style commentary that I want to edit into a longer vlog of filming, so that I can (hopefully) have something a bit more to look back on, and hopefully edit & post to YouTube- along with a bloopers reel.
We were able to rehearse and film all of the bedroom conversation, but we quickly realized that it was just over 30 seconds- which was probably not nearly long enough for what I needed. So, Bia came up with the (genius) idea to write my credits on boxes and have that be a part of the transition between the car scene and the bedroom scene. However, we didn't have the boxes yet, so I was left stumped as to how we were going to pull that off. But by then, we needed to film the car scene, which we had planned to do before I drove Bia home.
I piled a bunch of my bags and backpacks into the backseat, and then I had Max record several different takes of up to 30 seconds of me staring out the window wearing earbuds. We played Phoebe Bridgers' Motion Sickness to ensure that I would have sufficient footage for everything we needed. We also tried out several different techniques; I knew I wanted a slow zoom-out from a really close-up, tight, intimate shot to showing the rest of the backseat. Eventually, I settled on a computerized zoom on 4K footage (the rest of my footage is shot in HD 30 fps to reduce storage space and upload times), because after reviewing the different types of manual zooms Max was able to get using my phone's lenses (which zoom between 0.5x and 6x), all of them looked really blurry and shaky.
With that, the first day of filming was done. And, so, for now, am I.
Yours always,
Clover Fields
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