Near the end of my previous semester, the head of the school's filming department announced that we were partnering up with the theater department to film a three episode sitcom that would begin shooting early next year. As I was needing more experience and next semester I was also taking my first practicum class (In which I had to do enough hours of actual film work for) I sent in a resume and talked with him and found myself as one of two boom operators for the project.
About two months pass and about two weeks before filming would begin. A meeting was held as both a read through of the script and general introduction between the crew. The crew was predominately made up of students and this was also a learning experience for a lot of us as some, like my fellow boom operator, had never done something like this (I was considered the more experienced one by the fact I had one shoot as a boom operator under my belt).
Another week would pass, the first week of the month of shooting was practice for the cast. Week 2 of February was when filming would begin. Okay technically the first day that the whole crew was their was mostly practice and ensuring we knew what we were doing. Framing the shot, seeing where we would place the boom mike during each shot, running through each scene. The first two nights of the first episode were definitely the longest nights, Mr. Jones, who was the head of film department had us at a cut off at 11:00 as we needed to be out of the building. We Generally started at 6:30 to prep stuff and 7:00 was when we began shooting, But a lot of the scenes required pick ups do to small errors in continuity. During this time it was a much different affair compared to the shoot I had done boom mike operation on before, as there were multiple camera's for this shoot, we merely did one full shoot through and pick ups following any errors the director found. So finding the best position to get a full scene without appearing in frame and getting in the way of the live audiences that would be there Saturday night, and not knocking into the set which I did and nearly knocked down by accident. Thankfully, Saturday night went surprisingly smoothly after how long we went Thursday and Friday. We all likely got the initial bumps out of our system and that we were dealing with a real audience who had places to be. beds to sleep in that night that lead us to be a decently well oiled machine. Filming with a live audience was very different, previously there was some space behind us but now he had to be mindful of the audience as to not bump into them and having to pay their medical bill
Week 3 was a much smoother time, whatever initial problems there were before hand. One problem that there was that we had a major spike when there was yelling or vomiting, so to combat that we turned the microphone towards the ground to soften how loud the initial sound was when we did it initially. One notable memory I had was when we were filming a scene that took place at night after everyone had gotten food poisoning, I was standing in the kitchen area with the boom mike in hand and about half way through, one of the actors peeked their head through the doorway and that just kind of made me burst out laughing for about a minute, there was just something about that how smooth it was and I didn't see it that made it so hilarious to me.
The final week of filming was noticeably a much faster moving. Unlike the previous two weeks that had student directors directing the episodes, this episode was directed by Mr. Jones. We actually were able to get through consistently with very few pick ups necessary for this week of filming, this week also had arguably the longest scenes of the whole shoot and quite a lot of movement between the living area and kitchen, so me and my partner decided to focus on one portion of the room during one filming and then the other side during the next shooting. Following the completion of the final live shooting, we packed stuff up and the footage and audio are still in the hand of the editor and am waiting for it to finish it, and for this whole epidemic thing to just blow over.
Comments