The planning for the second day of filming went much smoother than the first time. We all made sure to confirm our free days a few weeks before so there would be no sudden changes in plan. Unfortunately, one of our teammates, Sasha, wasn't able to make it as she was travelling on that day, so the three of us filmed with the help of Keyona (who played the mother) and Eman's little sister (who played the childhood self of the protagonist). All the equipment that was needed, along with all the props were all brought by each of us on the day. Here is how we split the things among ourselves:
A sourse of inspiration for our movie is a short film called 'Broken'. Eman showed it to us while we were planning the shot list, and it seemed like a pretty good idea. We decided that we won't really use scenes with actual physical abuse in it since that would be very hard to film, instead we decided to use verbal abuse instead, and leave hints of physical abuse through showing the mother as an alcoholic.
Although our idea isn't completely similar to Broken, the thought process is the same. I think it's good to challenge the stereotypes because usually the child is shown to be abused by the father while the mother is the source of inspiration, in our movie it'll be the opposite.
Here is an idea of how we plan to show the mother's personality; old, worn clothing, constantly surrounded by cigarettes and alcohol, cold and bitter personality-similar to the mother shown in Broken. The only difference is that the mother in our film will be shown inflicting abuse more verbally than physically although the hints of physical abuse will be there.
By having these two female leads we will be showing our audience how women have different sides to them too. Our main protagonist is a character that was abused in the past but fought through it with hard work and determination, and became a professional boxer-a career that not many films show females having. Her character is an example of women's strength.
Her mother however, is an example that women are able to be manipulative and abusive too. It breaks their 'fragile' and 'soft' stereotype and will show our audience that not all women are as great as they are made out to be-some are capable of inhuman things.
By having these feminist undertones in our film, I believe the concept we came up with now are very interesting to follow. We have already started planning our shots as well as the dialogue which we previously forgot, so hopefully the second day of filming goes much better than the first.
Our first day of filming was a downer for all of us. The reality that filming what we had originally planned was too out of our league for the moment due to the absence of many things shone through on that first day. To counter that we knew we had to come up with something else, something that will allow us to keep our original idea without too many changes.
Knowing that filming an actual fight would be impossible to do, we decided to not complicate ourselves too much and decided to take a more simplistic route.
We decided to expand on the main protagonist's back story.
We already had a few points concerning her backstory, but we didn't really go into too much detail, not expecting that we needed to do so. A few shots had already been planned to be filmed with the mother to be used in the fighting scene, but since we couldn't use the fighting scene anymore we decided to focus more on the mother and daughter's relationship. With this new idea we will be able to show a more deeper side to the audience by exploring real world issues such as abuse.
Following what we previously came up with, we decided to keep the idea of Joud's father dying in war and her mother turning manic because of that. This time there will be hints of child abuse present in the film.
The basic idea of the film opening is this: A younger version of the protagonist will run up to her mother to ask her if she could go to a boxing match. Instead of listening her mother (who is shown smoking and drinking) tears up the poster and threatens the child. Scenes of abuse such as these will appear throughout the film until in the last scene present Joud will be seen punching the mother then the scene will cut to black.
We plan to use as well as challenge many stereotypes whilst filming this scene. Hopefully things will go much better than they did last time. I'm sure they will have we learned from our previous mistakes and know what to do properly.
The first day of filming really did not go the way we planned it to. Once we started filming we realized how difficult it is to film a fight scene. Although we tried to do it to the best of our ability, as you can see in the rough draft, it did not end up looking really good. While trying to edit, we noticed that even though we slowed/sped up the shots after putting them in order, the scene was still awkward to watch. We couldn't even use transitions to fix it because then the scene itself did not make any sense.
Another thing that we had overlooked was the script. None of us had remembered or even planned to make one. We had decided on early while doing our research that we would stick with action and not words. That proved to be very difficult once filming had begun.
Once we realized that a fighting scene would not work at all, we decided to add some unplanned scenes into it, which once again, did not work out. The people acting had to improvise a lot of the dialogue which was difficult because every time we filmed another shot again the audio had to be changed due to them not remembering what was said previously.
The audio itself came out pretty weak because by the time we started filming the dialogue filled scenes, more people had arrived so the background noise was too loud to properly cut out.
Although the shots were of good quality, I doubt we will be able to use them due to the lack of coherency. We might have to change our idea completely or film someplace more private.
Due to this experience mt team and I learned how crucial it is so plan everything in detail beforehand-even things we think we may not need. I am quite disappointed that a day was wasted, but this was a learning experience for all of us, and hopefully, will not happen again during future filming days.
Before we went to film properly my whole group and I went to the location to check it out and to get some test shots. The place was really good, but one concern we had was the fact that the ring was surrounded by exercising machines, and while filming it would be difficult to crop them out as only a small section is covered by a wall.
We quickly resolved this by planning to film right after school; a timing when most people would be absent. And we also decided to film the part of the cage that overlooked the wall so that the machines would be out of shot.
Another concern was the fact that there was a speaker placed right on top of the boxing ring which would make getting audio very difficult. Thankfully, the owner of the gym was kind enough to say that they would be able to switch the music from that speaker off the day we film.
Looking through the test shots I was very pleased to see that they had come out pretty good. It makes me feel excited for the actual day of filming. Although filming this will be difficult, I believe we will be able to do it.
Getting together to film had been much more difficult then any of us had planned. Each of us had an activity either for school or outside of school during different days, so picking out which date to film at QGym proved to be very hard.
However, after much discussion,and planning through both social media and school time we all finally set what time we were going to film. But, we only had one opportunity to film at our location as the rest of the days were packed for all of us, we decided to plan all of our shots carefully so that we could finish all the scenes concerning the ring at one go, without the need of going there again.
A copy of all of our private schedules. As shown, the four of us barely had any days where all of us were free, and since we all had our own individual jobs, we couldn't go filming whilst missing even one member of the team.
I didn't know that just planning to film on a certain day would be this difficult. I noticed that the communication between our team needed to be improved as all of us couldn't settle down enough to talk about our filming day properly, thus causing us to lose precious filming time.
