Shooting Day 2

Today, the entire group and Chelsea (who played the girl in the scene while I did the camera duties) met at my house at 6:30 to shoot as much as we could of the main scene with everyone playing poker. For the props/other scene elements, Evan brought over a poker table (that is, a collapsible top to one, which we flipped over to the dark side and placed on top of Conrad's foldable card table). Someone brought over cards with red backs and poker chips. I got 4 or 5 empty (yes, they already were empty) green beer bottles and took the wrappers off that identified them as actual beer bottles to substitute for the light blue beer bottles used in the actual scene. Also, since we filmed this in my finished basement that has light colored walls, Eli brought over dark blue sheets that we put up to cover the walls. We also covered the fluorescent light that was right above where we put the table so the room would be darker. (Because my basement has a drop ceiling, it was relatively easy to lift up the tiles and tuck the sheet into them to keep the sheets where we needed them. Lastly, we covered the other fluorescent light with the black bag that encased Evan's poker table top to again make the room darker.

Then, I looked through the camera settings, and found perfect settings to put the camera on. Firstly, I put the camera in "cine" mode. This made the room seem even darker. Also, it got rid of the fuzziness that we saw while shooting our last film that resulted from low light situations. Basically, it made everything look a LOT better. This is definitely a setting I would recommend telling other people about in the future to help with the quality of the films. Also, I adjusted the brightness a bit, and turned "my colors" off. We plugged in the smaller light (I forgot what it is called.) Then we were good to go. We ended up getting about 1/3 of that scene shot in the two or so hours we met today.