I woke up nice and early with a project to-do list in mind:
- Clear out living room
- Get equipment from Maya
- Test out big TV with converter I purchased
- Trying out equipment on set
After getting some volunteering done, I tackled the first item on the list: clearing out my living room. This was not an easy task, considering that area of the house has the most furniture out of the rest of the rooms, so finding space to put everything was difficult to say the least. Also, with my parents not being happy about having to live in a messy, visually chaotic household for the next couple days, moving everything ended up being twice as stressful (especially with the mouthful of comments that came from my mom). Obviously, both of my parents were doing me a huge favor by letting me film in the house, so I gladly took any blow for the well-being of the project.
After about half an hour, we somehow managed to clear the entirety of the living room and clean the floors, since we had never really cleaned behind that furniture ever since we placed it there. After some vacuuming and mopping, the set was looking good.
After this was done, Kim and I went to Maya's house to get the equipment she borrowed from Jim. We had already mentioned that we would be sharing the equipment, so there were no issues with Jim or Maya. We simply went to her house, double-checked everything, put it in Kim's car, and took it to the empty living room that will soon be the set for the documentary.
Kim had to quickly leave for work afterward, which left me to play around with the props and equipment even more. I had already tested everything except one thing: an HDMI to RCA converter that I had ordered earlier in the week in order to execute the live feed on the large TV. I had checked the day before that the TV was fully functioning (which it was), and gathered all the necessary cables to connect the camcorder from school all the way to the RCA connectors on the back of the 70-pound JVC television that was hanging out in the corner of my now-empty living room.
I had done my research on all this, figuring out which cables I needed (HDMI, the converter, a power cable for the converter, and an RCA female to male cable) and how to connect them in order to pull this off correctly. All I had been waiting for was the converter and power cable, which arrived later in the day.
Of course, not everything can go as planned.
Turns out that something happened to the big TV overnight (not sure what, because it was working perfectly the day before), because despite desperately trying to turn it on and consulting both my father and a plethora of troubleshooting websites for JVC TVs, the television would turn on (it made the "powering on" sound like usual), but the screen itself would remain black. I even tried to troubleshoot things constantly throughout the remainder of the day just incase I needed to wait for any results, but nothing changed. After $20 and several hours wasted, I decided to just stick to the smaller TVs and just mask the screen on like I was planning on doing for the other props, anyway. Despite there being an alternate solution, it definitely did not feel the best to deal with that the night before filming.
However, Once I finally decided to move onto other things, I was able to marinate in the excitement from last night. With the props in order and equipment set up, I was finally able to see what the set would look like - after weeks of planning, I was finally looking at the result of my efforts. Here are some pictures, including some of the test footage I took:
I will not lie, the set looked amazing - but I realized that this moody, futuristic look would only be achieved if we were to film at night. Up until this point, I had only tested the props in the daylight and genuinely thought that filming during the afternoon might be the way to go, especially since I had plenty of curtains and blankets to block the lights from my windows; but to my horror, I realized that the day would not work. It just would not be the same.
I immediately got very frustrated and wish I had been able to clear the living room earlier (since I did not have the space available until tonight to test things out), but because some family was staying over for their spring break, today was the earliest we could do it. Luckily, it was early enough that MAYBE the interviewees would be willing to change things around - but the only interviewee who could not film at night was the person we are interviewing tomorrow: Sabrina. Turns out she scheduled a shoot for her own project after shooting for our documentary, so things are looking quite complicated.
Honestly, this was my own fault for not turning on the TVs and trying out the set in my living room before, even if it wasn't in the final location. Mistakes happen, I just have to figure out how I'm going to manage the light tomorrow in order to try to replicate this lighting as much as possible. I really do hope the first day of filming goes well, and that Kim and I are able to figure something out. Wish me luck, everyone.
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