Hellooo!! Welcome back or welcome to my blog!! Today's blog is a continuation of my last post covering the rest of my group and I's filming days. In this blog, I'm going to be giving you guys insight on what it was like shooting on the road during our college field trip as well as what the final day of filming was like.
Days 4, 5, & 6 (College Trip)
As I've mentioned before, the girls and I as well as Jason attended a school field trip involving us touring colleges to get a feel of where we'd like to attend after graduation. This trip was a leading factor in our storyline! The colleges we attended included the University of Central Florida, the University of Florida, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Florida State University, the University of South Florida, and Florida Gulf Coast University. Out of this list, the girls and I allocated a college to each one of our characters.
- Vale/ Mariana: UCF
- Eli/ Phi: UF
- Yve/ Nahomy: FSU
- Maria/ Me: USF
On the first day of the trip, we were visiting UCF, Vale's college. Unfortunately we didn't end up getting ANY footage from this school. This was a major setback in our filming process, but I will get into further detail in my next blog. Not to fret though! The next college we visited that day was UF, Phi's characters' school.
Our plan for each location was to film a shot of each girl walking by/ walking into their schools' entrance. For each college we scavenged to find a scenic place that also included a clear view of the schools name. During a self-guided tour, the girls and I found the perfect place to film Eli's scene! Like the rest of our scenes in the film, we used the natural lighting of the golden-hour sun to illuminate that scene. With Nahomy as our camera women, we directed Phi to stand in front of the sign with her head first covering the camera's view of it. Then, she'd walk off further into the shot, exposing the college name and establishing the setting in a wide shot.
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And just like that, Phi's scene was complete!
Moving on, the next day was the day where we visited FSU Nahomy's characters' school. Given the success in Phi's scene, we thought we'd keep a similar idea for Nahomy's. We did film a few renditions of Nahomy/ Yve walking in front of the FSU entrance just in case we wanted to switch anything up during editing later. We also did not want the film to finish prematurely before the minutes, so extra footage was a must.
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Next up was my school, USF! On this campus, we luckily also had a self-guided tour, so we were free to capture any location we'd like on the campus. As filler footage, Nahomy got a couple shots of me/ Maria walking around scenic parts of campus, but these were never used because we didn't end up needing them to take up time during editing. Keeping a parallel style, my scene also showcased the back of my head covering the school name, then me walking off exposing the campus.
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Last days of filming!
Now, I did not forget that we haven't talked about Mariana/ Vale's scene! After all, she is our main character, so her college scene was the most important. Given a mishap we faced at her original school (UCF), we had to come up with a solution quick! On the second to last day of filming we had already arrived home after the trip. After missing our opportunity to film at UCF, we had to compensate. Fortunately, the closest university to where we live is the University of Miami, so on this day, Jason provided us transportation as we headed over to the campus to get our last shots. Uniformly, we stuck with the same style as the rest of our characters for Vale's walk off scene.
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Once we got the shot for Vale, we continued to walk around the campus to get any establishing filler shots. Nahomy was mostly in charge of this, and we actually ended up using that footage in the final film! We were so grateful that she filmed this shot because like we anticipated, our film's time was too short, so this last scene was definitely a life saver! It also provided the perfect chance for us to roll credits and introduce our title sequence.
After this, we headed back to Mariana's house to film another present day scene. If you remember from my last post, I spoke about a failed scene of Mrs. Andrea (Mari's mom) taking pictures of the girls showing off their college merch. We decided reinvent this scene, but this time we were going to be indoors. To give the audience more context and make the scene more comprehensible, we decided to set up Mari's living room as if our characters were throwing an intimate farewell party, grasping the last few days they'd be all together. To be honest, at this point we were working pretty last minute and were just throwing out any ideas we had. Quickly thinking, we decided to blow up some balloons, hang them around, and put a farewell picture on the TV.
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Given the fact that James and Jason were not present, we also had to figure out a way to set up the camera at the right angle by ourselves. This time, Nahomy could not film because she had to be in the shot, so we got creative and set the camera on Mariana's kitchen table using mail papers to hold it up to the angle we wanted. This is another example of where a tripod would’ve come in handy, but we had to work with what we had!
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Our new vision was to capture only Mrs. Andrea's hands taking a picture of us. Doing this, we did have some trouble keeping the camera in focus, so we asked Mariana's sister Natalia to adjust the camera's focus when needed.
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This scene was now a success! However, we still needed more footage!!! We thought of doing a flashback scene where the girls were playing JustDance. This was also the prefect opportunity for a match cut, so we kept the camera in the same position as the photo-taking scene. The girls and I changed into casual, silly pajamas and literally played JustDance with the camera rolling😆. When we looked at the footage, we got the exact natural, organic feel we wanted!
Also as previously mentioned, we faced some major editing issues. It was on this night that we realized our predicament, so we decided that we'd get together back at Mari's house the next day to situate everything. Out of concern for time, we also decided that we should add in scenes of Vale crossing off days in a calendar. The purpose of this was to take up more time, but to also give the audience more context into the storyline as we didn't want the film to be hard to understand. Before heading to Mari's that day I stopped by the DollarStore to pick up a cute calendar. Once we were all present, Phi and Nahomy decorated and filled the calendar to make it look as realistic as possible. With Nahomy filming and Mariana on camera, we filmed a sequence of crossing off days in the calendar to represent the time passing. We didn't know it then, but this idea was so important to the final product- Major success!
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And that, finally, marked the wrap on filming!
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