To say we didn't run into problems with filming would be a lie. To say we fucked the whole thing up would also be a lie. I don't want to lie in this blog post, so I'll say the truth; we didn't focus enough when we should of. Really it's my fault, since I signed up to be the leader of the project.
The first two days of filming went really smoothly. We had a schedule and we knew exactly what we were doing. I think that's where we ran into problems later.
What I liked:
Vika's house is a perfect place to film. It's has so many parts and angles that we made her one space feel like three separate houses. It fits the film tonally and gave the film personality. I also really liked Jzabelle's acting. It was surprising how good she was from having little experience. The camera doesn't love a lot of people, but it loves Jzabelle. I tell her to do act bigger and she actually does it. She does her best work when she's comfortable and I think she loved all the parts she had in the movie. She had to be distinctively different with each of her appearances to really justify having her play all the smaller parts. I was talking to her about how she should go about doing her police officer part, and she really bought into it. I used a trick I had learned a couple years ago in STAC to get people to act for the camera, I told to practice the movements and lines so I could see how it looked on the camera without actually filming it, but I would be filming it. It worked. But it didn't need to, because she did great without it in the next shot too. Really everyone's acting was pretty good, apart from mine. I had a problem with it, but by the time I was editing, I decided to let it go. I would normally take many shots so that I could get the acting totally right, but when I'm not filming, I don't know if what I had just done was okay or not. I should have looked back after every take to see if I was good or not, but I didn't, and now I know that I should. I had never really been in a group where I was the most experienced filmmaker, so if I ever needed to play a part in other films, I could rely that everyone else would note my acting, like in Shiana's film last year, I was constantly having to redo everything because Shiana was extremely picky, which was a trait I tried to reflect in this film, but even here I should have done more.
What I didn't:
After editing the first bit of what we had filmed on the first day, I came back and realized that there was a plot hole in my script. I had it that Vika and Grace went straight from the hospital to the sperm daddy's house. When they leave the hospital, and are in the car, you do not know where they are going. This problem is solved within a couple of seconds because of a line Vika has that explains why they're there and who my character was. I tried to fix it, but I didn't write anything to fill that gap, I just asked Vika and Grace to improvise, which I found out was a mistake. We spent a good half an hour trying to do that, and almost everything we got to fix the plot hole was useless because it either looked bad, or the fix would have changed more than that specific scene, and I didn't want to go and refilm the hospital scene because I had edited it already and I realized that adding any more dialog would have ruined the fast paced feeling that the scene needed. The other problem was the last scene. I wrote a scene that was way too out there. It would have taken another day entirely to film that one part, and the chances of it being confusing were extremely high. Especially because it takes place in Vika's tiny bathroom, where not only is it hard to get a good angle, but also because I had to make sure that we never actually saw the baby in the bathtub, because it wasn't actually there because we don't have a baby, real or fake, that we can get wet. Also, we had to film that entire sequence in 25 minutes because we were running out of time and I couldn't stay after even for a second. If there was one thing I could fix, it would have been that. We spent far too much time fooling around that day, because we didn't have much to film, and we had started late because we were waiting for Emily to finish her musical preview thing.
Overall, I like the film. It's funny and it was fun to make. You feel more comfortable when you're making something that's supposed to be ridiculous. Buddy films are just that normally, two people going on an adventure doing silly things, and that's exactly what it feels like.
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