Ellie and I reached Shillington on Monday and began shooting the sunset as we got there as well as all the night nature and village shots. We were pretty happy with the decision of spending the money to take the train to be able to catch the sky while on it and the transition from city to country. During the early night we managed to walk around the village to get some night shots, also giving us an extra luxury of time to test again with the camera settings. Going there a day early was probably the best decision we made with the whole day raining, it cleared up the night amazingly. Thus it gave us our one opportunity to get the moon. However we made the one big mistake of not checking where the moon rise or the moon’s track in the sky and we placed and calibrated the telescope in Ellie’s garden at the back of the house which could not view the moon. Instead the moon was best viewed from the front of the house and that was probably one of the bigger mistakes we made on the shoot. However the telephoto lens did pull through as we managed to get a nice shot of the moon even though we couldn’t get any close up shots with the telescope. That night we almost planned for the shots for the next day and what to do when to try and maximise the time.
Day 2 and 3 | 21st & 22nd March
We slept from 6am to 11am and when the rest of the crew came we began most of the scripted shots. I think what we failed too anticipate would be too much daylight time, there were periods where we were simply waiting for the sun to lower to the horizon. We spent a lot of that time trying to get more atmospheric sounds doing timelapses and we tried to fill the time and then when it got to the magic hour, it was just a frantic rush to get shots. The last few shots on the hills got harder and harder to take as we were running out of light and perhaps what we should’ve done we to not follow the timeline of the sequence of events in the script and actually go to the hills to film the telescope set up before filming all the house shots because the lights there were much easier to control. There was quite a lot of yelling here and there on the hills and it was freezing at 3 degrees, but of course, all the yelling was out of love!
But it was stressful to try and fight nature and time itself. Not to mention the hail and rain that unexpectedly happened in the afternoon, nature was really not on our side. As night fell we slept from 10pm to 3am, waking up hopeful to get the moon, and this time with the telescope in the right area. And we woke up to clouds. Guess we had to be expecting that with the weather saying some clouds, but it was a bummer that we waiting till dawn with not even a glimpse of the moon. Most of the bad things balanced out with the good thing of coming in a night early or the whole trip might’ve been quite a pity. Nevertheless as Team B left both teams looks out at the beautiful sunrise we managed to catch, and we can’t deny that the shoot trip wasn’t a good one.
As a team we all bonded really well together, though even at the start of shoot we weren’t to certain on who would be good at what technical role, but we learnt along the way, Elisha helps greatly with gaffer and lights, Ian took control of the sound and atmosphere and helped as second camera, and I helped to handle most of the technicals of shooting at night having tried out astrophotography in the past. Our team wasn’t generally the strongest in our technical skills and that had us worried for a bit but I think overall we really pulled through and everyone was such a good sport about sleeping at the most awkward times and waking up at 3am just to see the moon (who totally stood us up).
