Filming Coda

I had a blast filming "Coda in G Minor" this weekend. Even though this wee 3-minute film took us 8 hours of filming on Saturday. Mind you, about two hours of that was devoted to trying to figure out our "mirror shot" where you reflect someone into the live action. In our case, it was actually a "glass shot" where we reflected a transparent image into our scene, giving us a ghostly image. A lot of people had explained it to me verbally (though I have my doubts as to how many of them have actually tried it themselves), but I'm a visual learner so a diagram would have been extremely helpful. But now that I've figured it out on my own, I'll certainly never forget it. Maybe I'll even put together my own diagram of what I did and post it here when I'm feeling a little more ambitious.

We also shot a few "flashback" moments that I didn't have in the original script, so the film may end up being a little longer than 3 minutes. We'll see.

All in all, it was a fun day. But I am stressed about my exposures and camera movement. Mostly because I'm not used to being the one in control of the camera, partly because the camera portion of the workshop I took just covered 16mm not Super-8 and then throw in the fact that the room we were shooting in was only 5' x 7' (can we say cramped, boys and girls?) and add a dollop of my perfectionism and the stress makes perfect sense. But it was more fun than stressful (unlike my last film), so I call that progress!