We filmed p.1

 So as I previously discussed in our first day filming we just brought the 2 main actors, my partner Alejandro and my friend Lucas who's playing the dead body, as well as my friend Pedro who let use his camera. I've never really filmed a full complete narrative of this length so I wasn't sure how long it would take, but I was relatively certain we wouldn't get farther than the main set up when Bob first discovers the body. 

Unfortunately, despite being scheduled to film at the school district office from 5-9, we didn't really get started until about 6:30 because PEDRO forgot his SD CARD and I had to stop at WALMART to GET ONE. 50 dollars and 90 minutes later, we filmed for the next 2 hours and it honestly went pretty well. We remained relatively faithful to our script and storyboard, but there were some surprisingly cool improvised and spontaneous elements that I think turned out pretty well. 

To provide some examples, I knew I wanted to assert that Bob was a generally unpopular custodian, especially compared to his fellow custodian Lewis, which is why the teacher's wife would view Bob as a perfect subject for framing. While I planned on making this clear in their conversation when Bob has to get Lewis away from the bathroom, I feel like it had to be introduced early on, and with my mother on site, we figured out a way to do just that. Basically, she would play another teacher leaving the building, Bob would say "Bye Ms. Bernstein (not her actual name)", and my mom would just straight up ignore him, like Bob was basically a ghost who's not really respected by anyone. Again, this wasn't in my script or storyboard at all, but I think it turned out pretty well.

Another thing we improvised that I absolutely loved was this two shot from a sort of eagle eye point of view looking down at Bob and the apparently deceased teacher. In the moment, we all immediately jumped to the similarity to the iconic shot from the Breaking Bad episode "Crawl Space".

I like this shot a lot and I'm glad it came to us in the heat of the moment because obviously the high angle would reinforce Bob's lack of control in the situation but it also places him and a literal dead person in the same light, showing Bob too is dead in the sense that his life is kind of over as he's responsible for someone else's death and will face the consequences if he doesn't act quickly. It would be cool as the back of a postcard but it does kind of give the whole thing away about someone dying so hopefully some more shots will come to us that could be used on the postcard later on.

Also, to further establish a sort of moral grounding and motivation for Bobert's actions, because I was unable to print out a picture to put in his wallet before the shoot, I opted to just use a picture of my brother from when he was around 4 years old as Bob's wallpaper on his phone, as it works as a small detail that subtly provides some moral background to why Bob goes to such extreme lengths to hide the body. 

Overall, we only got up to around a minute or so into the film's exposition, but this first day provided much needed icebreaking and warming up to one another so that on Thursday I'm confident everything will go much more smoothly and we can get the filming process out of the way.