fake dumpstering

Having given up on interviewing Jo, we decided to concentrate on our action footage this week. We need this for the opening montage and cut-away shots. We have decided to stage a fake dumpster dive because no-one seems very keen for us to film the really doing it, understandably. It was pouring with rain most of the week, making it impossible, but we did some indoor filming. We took all the food out of my pantry that people in our interviews had mentioned and made a stop motion of the food piling up on my kitchen bench. We hadn't planned this shot, is was spontaneous but I think it will work perfectly in our film, providing some interesting viewing in between all the 'talking heads'. I filmed this standing on my kitchen table with the tripod so we could get some height. We also did some quick shots of me and my sister packing food into cardboard boxes, showing only our hands and feet, and taking the box back into our house. This, along with the fake dumpster dive footage we are planning, should create a nice story line to run through our doco, and personalise dumpster diving to the audience.

It cleared up on Thursday so we gathered some of our friends and took a box of food and went down to Island Bay supermarket. They had some open dumpsters that were filled with cardboard so we set up the shot so you couldn't see this and planted some of our food in there. We filmed our friends taking food from from the dumpster and putting it into boxes. There was a bright light directly above the dumpsters so we could see them clearly on the film, though it was quite grainy. It was a very public spot so we had quite a few interruptions, including a (pretty drunk) guy who ended up acting in a few of our shots. We also got a really cool shot of the silhouettes of our friends pretending to climb a fence around the back. This was also pretty grainy, but we have decided that this could be to our advantage, underlining how society forces criminalizes people that only wish to recycle what others are wasting.

After these we took some shots of the supermarket from out side which contrasted really well with the dark, grainy shots. I think that we have all the material we need for our opening montage, and that will be our next step - to start editing the opening sequence of our film. I'm also pretty sure that we have all the interviews and other cutaway footage that we need so we will be into full time editing from now.