Filming Blog: Car Scenes

    Hello and welcome back to another film production adventure. In this blog, I will talk about how my group and I tackled the mechanics of working with moving vehicles in the film! To start off our filming session, Riley was inside the house when she started having an asthma attack. I watched as she rushed out to her car to grab her inhaler to relieve her symptoms. I was quite concerned for her but she did whatever she had to do, said she was fine, and we went on with filming. We went back outside to Riley’s car and I had Marissa and Riley get inside to start on scene eight. This is where they pull into the driveway inside Riley’s car after an outing.  

For this scene, I was about to start filming when I noticed that my dad- who was waiting for me in his car parked beside the sidewalk- was in the way of our shot. I went and knocked on his window to ask if he would mind pulling up a bit so as to not be in the shot, to which he happily obliged. I felt a little bad asking him to move since this was not his first time driving me to our filming location thirty minutes away on his valuable time when he didn’t have work, but for the sake of filming, it could not be avoided. I had them pull out of the driveway and back out towards the left. As I filmed them drive back, I realized that the chalk on the street from our previous filming day with the child scenes was still on the ground. I walked up to their window and asked them to try the shot again but coming from the other direction towards the corner of the road. They said okay and I followed them down the road as they backed out to watch for oncoming cars that may come flying around the corner. They pulled back into the driveway, and even though a little bit of the chalk was still visible in the shot, we had no way of getting rid of it in the small amount of time we had to film that day, so we had to leave it and move on to the next scene. 

We moved on to scene nine where Riley puts her car in park that I filmed with an insert shot of just the gear shift. This was a relatively easy shot to film. I got in the backseat of the car and decided to just give my phone to Riley to film so it would look like her perspective. Besides accidentally filming the gear going from park to drive instead of drive to park once, she quickly shot it and we were on to scene ten. 

    Scene ten is where Riley puts away her sunglasses in her center console where I was planning on putting an actor’s name. Her console was pretty full of her stuff- as most are- so I looked around for a different option. This is when I found the drop-down sunglasses holder on the ceiling of the car. I don't know why, but when making the storyboard I had completely forgotten that these existed, and would make much more sense for a teen girl to be putting her sunglasses in than throwing them inside her center console. I also thought the empty space inside the holder would be a good spot to put the title as well. This shot took a few tries since Riley was able to be seen inside the rear-view mirror, which we couldn’t end up making look natural. Because of this, I asked Riley to step outside of the car so she wouldn't be visible. Marissa put her sunglasses in the compartment, and we were finished. 

    We then filmed scene eleven, which is the two getting out of the car. I got out of the back seat of the car and gave Riley my travel backpack that I brought with me since I was going somewhere after we were done filming. I’m so glad I brought it since Marissa and Mackenna only had one backpack at this house. I stood pressed up against the garage door and realized that wasn't going to work. I ran inside quickly to open the garage door so I would have more room to get a good shot that fit both of them in the frame. This scene took a few more tries than would be expected. Riley kept getting the backpack stuck on things inside the car, or someone would accidentally look directly at the camera since I was a bit close. Nonetheless, we completed the scene and moved on to our final scene of the day. 

    Scene twelve was the two of them walking into the house. For this, I had them put their backpacks on and I followed them around the corner of the house and in through the door. I wasn’t sure how much of the clip I would need for editing so I followed them the entire way up to them being fully inside the house. I had the idea to close the door behind them while I was filming because I thought it would look interesting if it made it into the final product. This scene took a little planning out how they were going to wear their backpacks, who would go inside first, if would they be talking to each other, etc. We finished up and could feel us getting closer and closer to completion!