And....Action!

Whew! Acting and directing is exhausting. Alex and I shot the entire film opening from 9:30am-4:00 pm today at my house.
I woke up pretty early around 7:30 to finalize my costume (from my mom's closet), charge/set up the camera, and organize the downstairs of my house. Alex shopped at Goodwill for his costume and found an awesome 'detective' trench coat for five bucks! I quickly did a low tight ponytail, natural but bold makeup, and threw on some pearls. (also my mother's)

Alex came over shortly after I was finally ready and we began a long day of shooting.
We decided to first shoot the opening credits (the magazine letters we cut out) on my dad's office desk. Boy, was this a struggle! Any movement made the tiny words go flying and made us set it up all over again. This took a lot of patience but we were able to do it. I used two bright lamps on either side of the desk to shine on the letters as we shot them from above. Once we were done with that we headed downstairs to film the rest of the scenes in my dining room and front door area.

We had a tripod but were missing the important piece that connects the camera to it, so we improvised. I took a huge stack of old yearbooks and piled them onto the dining room table to place the camera on, and it worked great! All we had to do was raise and lower the camera by adding or removing books and our shots were pretty steady.
The whole process took longer than we expected it to, but we realized that that is the process of creating a great film. All of our creative ideas took time and effort to execute but with our determination we were able to do it! Also, the hilarious bloopers are well worth it in the end.
-L