Project 4: Filming

We had a total of 3 days of filming, one at Andrea's apartment for the video recording for Kansas scenes and two at the Digital Art and Animation Studio for the still photography of Oz scenes in the dark.

DAY 1

The first day of filming at Andrea's was done entirely by Andrea and Mia while John, Dan, and myself went to the Blacksburg and Christiansburg RadioShacks to gather all the resources we needed to make the LED shoes. Before we split up, we discussed as a group what we wanted in each transition then Mia and Andrea did a great job making it a reality. Andrea dressed up in a Dorothy costume she had from the Halloween a year before and Mia filmed with the digital video camera. They completed all of the video recordings of Dorothy in Kansas that we needed in around 2 hours since there were no additional sets or dialogue.

DAY 2

The second day of filming was done upstairs at the Digital Art and Animation Studio by the entire group. At this point we had finished creating all of our planned sets and costumes and had all materials that we needed to do the still photography in the dark to show off our world of Oz. Mia took all the photos while the other four of us moved the sets into place for each shot and positioned the characters and lights. Before we actually setup our black backdrop we didn't have a definite idea about how we would position our sets and costumes in frame. We ended up using a mixture of items behind the cardboard to prop them up and people holding items from behind the black backdrop. We also needed two people keeping the black lights in position to get the glow effects to show well on film. We got a lot of scenes finished and discovered that we were missing a few set items that we would prepare for our next day of filming. A lot of the first day was a learning experience.

DAY 3

The third day of filming was also done upstairs at the Digital Art and Animation Studio by the entire group two days after the second day. It was much the same as the second but we had the process of taking photos in the dark and character movement down, the shots we got this day looked a lot better than the shots from the day before and we even redid a few scenes. We had spent the Wednesday in between fixing some sets and costumes. The movement in the shots today was much more fluid and there was less random teleporting in these shots. One issue we continually struggled with through days 2 and 3 of filming was the sensitivity of the circuitry on the LED ruby slippers, mainly the connections to the batteries. We opted out of buying special connectors for the 9 Volt batteries and instead tried to solder the electrical wire directly to the batteries which did not work very well. We finished all filming that day and Mia went home with all of the photos.