Filming Process

For our Starbucks commercial, I played the part of the actor. In the morning I had to go buy our prop, which was a cup of Starbucks tea. I brought it to school and had our teacher hold it for me so it would be filled for filming. My partner signed out the SD Card, Camera, and Tripod while I get our storyboard and the rest of our props. I picked out the spot where we would film. While the whole senior patio, where we filmed, fit for the storyboard; I wanted a place that would have good lighting and minimal background distractions. We ended up in a table right around the back of the patio near the walkway. I chose that spot because of the transition from the split-screen to a wide shot smoothly. This took some time because I was trying to line everything up with the storyboard we had created.

After we found the right location I started setting up the camera and tripod. I was first trying to figure out whether or not we should do the handheld shots first or the pan shots on the tripod. I decided on doing the pan shots first because I figured they would be more stable, reliable shots. I did the majority of the setting up of the camera and the angles while trying to keep everything consistent. The first take was a long shot of me walking down a path for our split-screen scene. We took that shot a couple times because a group of people ended up being in the background. I wanted to do the scenes in chronological order so even if some shots didn't go well I still wanted to continue. The first set of pan shots were taken with my glasses on. That's important because of the consistency that we needed. Even though the table placement was fine there was a bench in the way that would be hard to avoid. I wanted the scene, that would be the split-screen going into one, to merge smoothly. Therefore I wanted to experiment with some tracking shots of me after I passed the camera. 

Before we started the tracking and handheld shots we did some eyelevel shots of me sitting down with the drink like planned. That took a bit of time because we wanted to get the timing right but we eventually got a good enough shot. After we got the essential shots we did some establishing shots and some zoom-in and zoom-outs for the other side of the split-screen. I checked the gallery on the camera to watch the shots that we took and realized that at some point during filming that I took my glasses off. Because of that, I went through the footage that we at least had one of each take with my glasses on and off. We had to retake some for quality sake and some just for back up. I even thought of some different takes that we could do that would minimalize editing or make the transitions smoother. After we filmed and reviewed everything, we gathered our equipment and went back to class. When we reached class I did the dumping of the footage onto the computer while my partner put the equipment back. We started off with about 17 videos that we took and I started to organize and decide whether I wanted to keep it or not. I didn't want to completely get rid of the footage that we took with glasses on so I labeled each clip with what was happening and if my glasses were on or not. In the end, we ended up with around 11 videos of clips that were good enough for the commercial that we'd put together.