Filming is always very stressful but at the same time, it is a huge amount of fun that you miss as soon as you turn the camera off.
Go With Him was filmed in one day on location in Newbury, Berkshire. If you’ve not read my Pre-Production blog yet, read that first, then come back.
Welcome back!
As is always the way with filming outside, we were fighting light, time and the elements. While it never felt like we were rushing, to begin with, by the end we were really running through the final scene – which I would’ve loved to have more time over but the rain got us.
So let’s dive into the nitty-gritty:
Cinematography
I made some very distinct choices in terms of camera movement and lighting during filming the rehearsals that would aid us in post-production later on.
My camera of choice was the Canon C100. This is because it is my camera. I filmed in C log going into an Atomos Ninja Blade (my first and last time using this Ninja Blade, not because it wasn’t fantastic, but because it stopped working the day after the shoot).
I knew that we would be on close up’s for 95% of the film. I was on my Canon 70-200mm f2.8 IS for pretty all of the shots apart from the wide shots where I switched to my Tamron 24-70 f2.8 VC. These are my go-to lenses.
We were on sticks for the entire shoot. I made this decision because being hand-held does not lend itself to the rom-com genre.
For lighting, we had a series of reflectors and scrim to help soften shadows when the sun came out and to add some fill to the actors. The majority of the day the sun was behind clouds, giving a very soft natural light but on occasion, the sun did come out, I had to add a scrim overhead and adjust my exposure accordingly.
Sound
One thing I have learned is that sound makes or breaks a film. With my last short film ‘I Did’, we ran a separate sound system for all the actors. You can watch how we I achieved this here:
Again I wanted to do this for ‘Go With Him’. We ran a Rode NTG1 in a blimp directly into my C100 so that we had great in-camera audio no matter what. The blimp was on a boom arm stand as I didn’t have a boom operator (except for this shot here where I coerced Richard into holding it for a wide shot.
Then I had a Zoom H4N with two Rode Film Maker Kit’s running into it and a Rode SmartLav Plus going into a Zoom H1.
We kept one of the lav mics attached to Pippa at all times (re-rigging it to a wedding dress was not something that I wanted to keep having to do) and the other we moved around between the guys only using the SmartLav Plus and H1 on wide shots when we needed to. That way we had great audio all the time no matter what.
We hid the lav mics using the Rode Invisilav’s which did pretty well at keeping the rustling to a minimum.
The Shoot
Filming is always great with a crew and a cast who love what they are doing.
In terms of things going wrong, we were interrupted by the Newbury Carnival procession at one point, had some over-enthusiastic dogs barking for about 15 minutes and had some light rain. These were all things we couldn’t control.
I have to admit that this one of the most fun I’ve had on a shoot for a long time. The footage looks great and sounds fantastic and the best part of it is that you want to do it all over again.
Read all about how we tackled post-production in my next blog.
Until then, here is the trailer.