Studio Production: Re-shoot - Mockumentary + Trailer

After a rough cut viewing of the VTs featuring the character Norman, we decided to re-shoot some footage to give us more coverage and allow us to change our approach. Some of the footage we had for the mockumentary, Helen said was quite slow in pace and was dragged out. The character was speaking slowly and was saying 'erm' quite a lot which meant that we couldn't cut it down very effectively.
We decided to schedule the day the same as we had before with the mockumentary in the morning and the trailer after lunch. In order to steer away from the one take approach, we booked out another camera. This will allow us to get a wider variety of shots to cut to in the edit which should dramatise the film a little more. We ran through the second half of the script where Norman is in his bedroom and changed some of the shot sizes to include some tighter shots. Throughout, Troy was capturing some cutaways such as objects falling on the ground and of the posters in the background. These should help to give the edit more context and allow the audience to get to know the character better.
As the director, Saskia ensured that Darren knew that he had to speed up the lines so that we could cut it more smoothly. In hindsight, I think this was a great decision as it added much more energy to the shots, which was apparent during filming. I noticed that the team were able to communicate more effectively for this time round as we were all aware of what we needed to get and how we wanted the edit to look. I think in terms of set up we were also much more organised and we were able to get on with filming very quickly.

After lunch we filmed some extra footage for the trailer. I was happy with the shots for the montage section so we didn't need to re-shoot those. However, I wanted to film the sequences with the crew cameos again to get a wider coverage of shots and improve on the first shoot. I focussed on ensuring I got several different shots for each sequence including wider and tighter shots to make it easier for the editors. I also ensured that we used two cameras for the sequence with Saskia, placing one of them from Saskia's point of view to get the shot reversal. Set up was pretty simple as we only needed to dress the room which meant that we were able to stick to the schedule. Overall, I think that the team work was better on this shoot day as I think we all knew what we wanted to achieve. I think some areas for improvement would be to communicate with each other with regard to equipment and setting up.