Live Brief 2 - The Babysitter Shoot

The Babysitter is the first of our short films for Urban Legends, and is the longest therefore we decided to film it first, giving Chloe more time to edit it, and getting it out of the way early. The shoot took place Saturday 27th February and was filmed at Drew Brockbank's home. All crew arrived for 2pm and began setting up Drew's house for the shoot. This included moving furniture around and making mini sets for the actors, as well as setting up equipment and finding out when we can and can't do in the space. Actors arrived at 5pm for a script breakdown and some food and the shoot commenced at 6pm. My role on the shoot was to act as script supervisor, runner and secondary cameraman. I was in charge of the secondary camera which we used mainly for static cut away shots, I also was the main dolly operator for the few shots we used with that.

The shoot started off really smooth, the actors were great and comfortable, and we spent quite a few time on the first shots to get into the groove and they were also quite heavy dialogue shots so it was important to capture it correctly without any inconsistencies. There were three actors on a whole on set, but we made sure all Terrence's shots (Who plays the father) were out of the way nice and early. He only has a few lines at the beginning and once they were out the way he was able to get going and we were able to focus more on The Babysitter played by Cassie. Drew got a great performance out of the actors and always made sure they were ready and knew what they were doing before we started filming. There was quite a lot to capture and only given one night to do it, but we didn't feel like we were rushing it all, we moved a comfortable pace and in hindsight, maybe moved a little to quick over a few scenes that  needed some more attention. Jack who played the killer only made an appearance near the end, as its revealed he's outside, and this was quite the tricky shot to capture due to the complexity of the shoot and space provided to do it in. The crew bonded well on set and helped each other out a lot I'd say, just making sure every shot got done right.

Filming completed around 11pm on schedule as we got the last shot for the shoot. Considering this was our first shoot as a crew and the longest short we have, It feel like it went quite well. There were no hiccups production wise or problems with the location. Once we were there we were able to crack on and just get the job done. An issue we might have had was having too many people on set and location at one time. As the whole crew was there which was good but, space wise it could have done with maybe a few less people as there were a total of 10 people on set at one time including actors. Other than that the shoot was great, I was able to help out on multiple roles and get more experience with camera equipment while shooting, and see the crew work together after weeks of pre-production. It was weird and great to hear words you wrote starting coming out of actors mouths, It was quite a surreal moment and look forward to it happening on the following shoots.