The blinking shot

 Hey guys! I wrapped up filming and am very please with what I have been able to accomplish. 

Many things will be post-production, such as the edited police sirens, so I have my work cut out for me. Regardless, I found this very fun to film. I had to redo a couple of scenes, for example, when Isabel takes the boy to the bathroom because she is paranoid that the cops are there. I redid this scene a couple of times in order to get Bekah into the character and get more emotion out of her. I found it really easy to film Leo’s parts because he was mostly standing still with no expression on his face. Whenever she spoke to him he showed no expression, which caused her to be more remorseful and further develop her paranoia.

I mostly had trouble with the POV shot of Isabel blinking. Basically, when she was on the phone with the police officer and she overhears the police officer saying that she was just imagining everything and there is no kid, I wanted her to be staring at Leo, and with a literal blink of the eye, he was gone. Honestly, I think I was thinking too much into it because I kept trying to use a shirt, for example, but I wanted to include the eyelashes by getting pieces of floss, coloring it black with eyeliner, and taping it to the shirt. This did not look good because eyelashes are curved. I was getting frustrated and decided not to be stubborn, so I looked up videos online. I felt so stupid that the method could be that simple! I got a beanie and I wrapped it over my phone and then closed the beanie over the camera slowly.

While it was painfully simple, it still took me a while to close the beanie at the right pace. Her blink could not be too slow because the purpose behind this POV shot is how quickly reality can change. However, in that blink I had Leo move out of the frame so it was just one long take, but since I moved the beanie so fast, it just didn't look good on camera. I finally decided to make the scene in slow motion. When she overhears the officer, her vision blurs and she dissociates and drops the phone. Since she slowly turns towards Leo, her blink is in slow motion as well and there was time for him to get out of the frame.

Honestly, I did not know how frustrating it could be to film something that is just a couple of seconds long, but I'm glad I was able to figure it out!