Filming Session #2

Our second filming session took place on 5th of October 2010. We filmed this in the main school hall, as a lot of it was supposed to be taking place in a ballet studio and on stage, meaning we needed a large space for it. We had originally planned to use the drama studio, as it is a big black painted room with hard floor so would be suitable for the ballet scenes. It also had a spotlight in which we wanted to aim at Lauren in her final scene when 'perfoming on stage', however we got around this problem by using a slightly more difficult to use spotlight in the main school hall instead. In this filming session we filmed the majority of our shots, meaning we needed to be organised and know what order we were filming in to ensure the actors did not have to hang around waiting for us to decide who we needed first. Because we were using 3 actors in this filming session: Lauren playing Savannah, Emily playing Eleanor and Mrs Smith playing the ballet teacher, we ensured that we filmed the scenes involving Mrs Smith and Emily first, as they were in the least shots and therefore we didn't want them to have to wait around.

The filming went really well. All actors performed without getting distracted, meaning the whole process was a lot faster, and the shots looked good. As we were filming on the school hall stage, we decided to remove the front blue curtains and also some equipment at the back of the stage. We also pulled across the black curtains and placed a CD player at the edge of the stage to show they were practicing with music.

One problem we found was that once filming a few scenes we thought that Lauren playing Savannah was actually slightly better at dancing than Emily playing Eleanor, which may have caused the viewers of the trailer confusion as Lauren was supposed to be the amateur who was just learning to dance, but finally at the end of the scene was a pro at ballet. We decided to film a few shots of each character dancing, and when it came to the editing stage we would simply have to cut the parts of Emily dancing her best and Lauren dancing at her worst to portray their true characters.