Hope - Day 7

Today is our last scheduled shoot for Hope and it's the big car crash scene. We have the studio, car and equipment booked and are also doing some hospital ADR beforehand. We had the Mother, Father, a Doctor and two nurses (exclusive cameo from me). Most of it was improv so there was plenty to edit with to fill out the scene. It went very smoothly and we now have two great actors under our belts for future productions (Martin the Dad and Ethan the Doctor). 

We waited quite a while after that for the car to arrive. But when our last actor arrived, there was no sign, so we had to improvise. So we got another car. It's slightly different to the one in the Wetherspoons scene but we might just get away with it as the only shot of it that's used is in a puddle and most of it is obscured. Needs must. This was an essential scene to get for hand in or the film just wouldn't make sense. First, we got a shot of the Mother smoking in the car outside (it was raining so we had to keep wiping it!) and got it dropping on the floor. This was all done in slow mo and looked great. This went quite smoothly once we knew roughly where the cigarette was going to fall (we were worried the wind would blow it away but we were safe).

Then we moved the car inside the studio to do the driving at night. I preferred this a lot more than filming inside a moving car so we got Hope's close ups again as they were quite wobbly last time. The only huge problem was lighting. We had a lot of studio lights on and took us a while to get a balance and not light up the black studio screen behind. We were debating whether to use green screen but opted out because in the other car shots, it was mostly black outside and having green screen in might throw the whole film off. We also had one studio LED on a stand high up for extra lighting for outside shots like the door handle and Hope getting inside. For the travelling shots, we had two small LED lights. One to light the scene and one moving one to act like moving street lights. This was really effective in the end and a great arm workout.

For the emergency lights, we ran into a lot of bother. For the tests, we used red heads and waved gels in front of it. But we didn't have them on set, plus there was not a lot of room and would have been way too powerful. So we put gels on the small LED lights. The red one worked fine but the blue one was very weak. I suggested doubling it up which worked a bit better but still quite weak compared to the red one but better than it was. Hopefully it can be boosted in post.

The shoot finished a bit over schedule, but it's done! I can't wait to see the slow motion back, I wish I got some of the Mother in the crash in slow motion too but we didn't have a whole lot of time. But what we did get and had a quick look at looked fantastic.