Filming.

Filming the self harm story

On Thursday 3rd of November, me and Rabbi planned to go to my brother, Aaron's house to film the 'self harm' story. We went to his house because we wanted him and his partner Lindsey to act in our short film and I thought that the upstairs of their house would be ideal for what we intended to film. We went round and I explained the basic plot line of the story so that she had some context about the film, we then explained it to my brother and told them that we would like them to improvise an argument that is based on the sexuality of the character 'Jade' that i am playing. They stood either side of the dining table, Lindsey stood up and my brother sat down. We practised the argument twice before actually filming so that they could get into it more easily and we could see how they were going to act and if we thought it was okay. Lindsey started off the argument and then they went from there. The argument was better than me and Rabbi had expected and so we set up the camera to film the scene. We start off this scene with Jade just arriving in the house. We had the camera being handheld by me so that the audience gets to see exactly what i am seeing. I shut the door and this is then Aaron and Lindsey's queue to start arguing, with the camera in hand i walked down the hallway slowly and then film the argument for about 10 seconds. In the argument my brother said that he wanted Jade out of the house because of her sexuality and he wanted nothing to do with her, Jade overhears this and so she gets upset and she runs upstairs. The camera was still handheld so that the audience see's everything that Jade does. She runs upstairs and into her bedroom, she is panting ans crying uncontrollably, she goes straight over to the chest of drawers and she gets out a little box. When the audience see this box they will wonder what it is and why she is getting it. They then find out when Jade gets on the bed and opens the box to reveal three blades that she has taken from pencil sharpeners. The audience can then piece together that she intends to cut herself.

We took other shots for running up the stairs so that the shot will switch from my point of view to then a view from the bottom of the stairs. We filmed the rest of it upstairs which basically showed Jade getting angry and upset even more which then drives her to putting a blade to her wrist. She doesn't want to kill herself though so the cut wasn't deep. She harms herself and then to end this story we have her looking up directly at the camera and she then says "I'm okay."

Rabbi is the director of this short film and so other than the hand held part of the story, she was filming. She filmed the same part from different angles so that we can have an invisible editing effect in our film, when out together it will hopefully look quite effective. She had some shots from quite down low and other up high, and we also had one shot where the camera was resting on my leg so that we could see Jade lowering the blade to her wrist. We tried to use a variety of different shots to get everything we needed and when watching everything we filmed we decided that everything went exactly as we wanted it to and we are really happy and relieved that we have got one story done the way we wanted it too.

The only shot that we need now for that story is a shot that shows Jade walking up to the house and then walking in. We were going to do that on Thursday but we got outside and it was very dark and so there wouldn't have been any point because we wanted to to be a bit lighter. We told Lindsey this and she says we can go round anytime we want to film that little bit.

Acting in the story
I was very nervous to be acting in our film because i thought that i would get it wrong and mess the whole film up. The first part that we filmed was the handheld part and for the first take, i walked down the hallway too fast and my filming of Aaron and Lindsey's argument wasn't as good as it could have been, i didn't get them both in all the time and it was a bit shaky. Then was the part where i run up the stairs after seeing the argument and this part went much better, i had to pant and be panicky. I ran up the stairs quite fast which made me pant anyway, and i was nervous about filming it which naturally makes me shake and so the effect that we wanted went perfectly because i was shaking a lot and that is exactly how the character would have been. I had to run up the stairs quite a few times which made me out of breath for most of the time. The second time filming the argument was much better as we got a really good shot of my point of view looking round the door to then witness the argument. The running upstairs was slightly better as well because i added a cry into the sound as well as panting, which really added to the upset effect that we wanted.

I had to be panting for most of the shots and i really had to act as if i was genuinely upset and angry. It took up a lot of energy and by the end of it my mouth was dry and i was so out of breath from it all. I wasn't expecting to be that worn out from it, but i really did put all my effort in so that we got exactly the shots we needed. When we had finally finished Rabbi went to get me a drink of water, and i couldn't physically move my body, i was lying on the bed and found it hard to get back up. I felt like i was going to faint.

But i think it was all worth it because me and rabbi had such a great time filming the story and we were incredibly proud of what we managed to film and it made up optimistic about the rest of our short film.