On Wednesday 22nd October 2014, we met at Bolehall Manor around 9:45 am. The actors ( Maisie and Lilian) joined us shortly afterwards. We first debriefed everyone of what was going to happen in the day. We spent roughly an hour doing this as well as setting up the set. We moved the table and chairs towards the back of the restaurant and set up the desk with office supplies together with a stereo and some more "homely" touches. We needed a photograph of Maisie (Roseanne) and her 'parents', so while she got dressed to look younger, we asked Jackie and Owen (the managers of the Manor) to play the parents in the photograph. Once this was done, we took and printed off the photo and put it in the photo-frame on the desk. It would have been smarter to have done this before the filming day as it would have been quicker but luckily it only set us back around 10 minutes off schedule.
Once everything was set up, we were able to start filming properly. We started off by filming the Grandmother (Lilian) 'picking up the letter' from the floor by the front door and 'looking at the letter' with Roseanne's name written on it. This was easily filmed using the tripod, however the tripod did get in the way when she picks up the letter) and didn't take very long. We then moved on to the 'walking up the stairs' scene. This was filmed at a high angle from the balcony at the top of the stairs on the landing. It only took several attempts to get the shots looking good. We moved the tripod to the corner section of the stairs so that we could get a tilt of the Grandmother holding the letter as she goes up stairs. However the tilt was fairly rough and did not flow correctly. Unfortunately we were running behind schedule at this point and did not have time to do the shot again.
The next scenes we did were focused upstairs in Roseanne's office. We managed to film a pan of the Grandmother walking towards the desk and a match on action when she gives Roseanne the letter. We uncounted a major problem when Lilian was unable to say her lines without forgetting them or doing something wrong. Eventually we wrote everything on a whiteboard and I sat behind Maisie on the windowsill and held up the lines behind her head so as she read them it looked like she was talking and looking directly at Maisie. Once these scenes were finished we decided to have a short 20 minute tea break and Lilian went home.
After 20 minutes, we went back to filming. We filmed the scenes where she opens the letter, reads it and walks out of the office. The close ups of the eye and letters were done with the tripod and the part where she grabs her coat and starts to walk off was done using the dolly. These scenes took around one hour to film. The last shots we did were the ones on the street and the letter being posted. These were done fairly quickly and took around 15 minutes to complete. Luckily we were finished by the time it started to rain heavily which would have affected the quality of the outside footage. We had some problems with the way the letter fell as it kept getting stuck in the box instead of dropping down to the floor as we wanted it to. Eventually we finished all the scenes,re-arranged the furniture back to its original place and packed up the equipment and went home.
Overall the filming day was a success as we managed to get all the footage we needed with only minor slip-ups occurring. Unfortunately there were a few major shots that had errors (such as being able to see the tables and chairs we had pushed to the back in some shots) and needed replacing, but we were unable to re-film due to only have one day to film and time restrictions.
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