Blog Post #40 Behind The Scenes: Part One

 Today I will be talking about the first half of my filming process and how I utilized it.

On February twenty-eighth I drove with my actors to Veterans Memorial Park where we would start the filming process by utilizing the surrounding environment with the opening shot. I was able to do this because of the vast vegetation next to the basketball courts at veterans, also by always by keeping my camera at a tilted angle it minimized glare from the sun. The filming process was made fairly easy because of the constant availability of key light though, so in turn it was a solid tradeoff for having to keep the camera tilted. Also, the action shots were fairly easy to make also because of the abundance of key light making the actors expressions more visible to the audience. We started the filming process by having the actors play an off-camera basketball game, this is so that when we were shooting the scenes the Mise-en-Scene was used to its fullest. This is through the sweat of the actors adding to the realism of the scene and this also helps the audience understand the temperature that the actors were feeling. This is also because of the lighter colored clothing that my actors were wearing in order to further convey this plot detail. 

This is where some of the research that I used came in to help with the costuming research helping me understand that it is easier to convey the heat of the sun to the audience through lighter color clothing. This is because of the fact that darker color clothing absorbs more heat from the sun making it less realistic if the actors were to wear them. This is in contrast as to if my actors were wearing darker colors because this would convey that it is a cooler day out and that would oppose the natural lighting of the sun that I am using for my films opening two-minute sequence. So just by making my actors wear lighter colors I am able to make the scene feel more realistic and help the audience connect with my film better because of the correlation that lighter colors convey that it is a hotter day in the shot. This in turn helps convey my scenes use of natural lighting and why I used the Mise-en-Scene factor of sweating in my film.