Day 1 of shooting for Miss Familiar went off without a hitch…. which is to say everything went smoothly once we figured out how to work around certain technical limitations. It was unfortunate that after picking up all the rigging gear (along with a brand spankin’ new tripod) on Friday night and testing it out it turned out that the matte box for the follow focus rig was not rail mountable and was designed only for specific lens diameter measurements – fittingly enough, none of which was the appropriate mount diameter for the lenses we would be using (50mm, and 67mm); not a huge issue, but it would’ve been nice if we could’ve used everything we paid for.
We met up at 8am at Toronto independent grocer Food Depot near the intersection Dupont/Davenport intersection. It was apparently at one time an old IGA grocery store, so even with it’s small size it featured all the visually iconic set dressings that a larger grocer like Metro, Loblaws, or Sobeys would have, and the owner was kind enough to let us film there for our opening sequences with our lead actress Alli Chung. We worked around the incoming grocery store clientele who were looking to pick up some early morning food items, so there were no problems there.
Actress Alli Chung practices her lines after arriving at the house location.
By 9:30am we’d finished up under the humming fluorescent lights of the grocer and headed south to our street/house location on Admiral Rd. just north of St. George subway station. A historic brownish-red brick building that would serve as the culmination of the walking sequence encounter that formed the majority of our script. We shot this section early on in advance of the walking shots or the park encounter that would precede it chronologically since the sun was only just coming overhead and after a few hours the lighting would change drastically between shots – and if we could avoid being in direct sun in the upper 20ºC range for an extended period of time we felt we’d probably all be better off.
Writer/Actor Jack Murray during our location scouting.
Luckily with all the different things going on our extra hands started working double duty to ensure everything ran smoothly – set photographer Kareen Mallon and makeup artist Sophie Ricard subed in as audio tech/boom pole operators; Ms. Ricard also helped with some camera technical bits by pushing on the camera while I pulled the focus during a few complicated pan/tilt shots – funnily enough, it turned out the camera was so light physically that the movement of the follow focus dial continued to push it to the right and out of the focusing gear.
With these out of the way, we took a brief reprieve before heading to the park down the street for the initial encounter shots; quickly hammering t, we took a brief reprieve before heading to the park down the street for the initial encounter shots; quickly hammering through this and picking up the two walking shots in alternate locations on the street to mask the scene as though it all took place on the same street in one constant left-to-right movement. Hopefully this translates well to screen, though I haven’t had a chance to do any editing yet in order to see it visually and probably won’t for a little while, so with luck everything will turn out in the end. Extra luck for us, we managed to wrap the day’s shooting just shy of 6:30 p.m., having completely filled a 32GB SD card (see picture)
Day 1 of shooting WRAPPED - just in time :/
Day 2 of shooting will hopefully occur this-coming weekend and take care of the pre-credit bar sequence that Jack and I have been plotting out in order to explain his character’s hung-over state – as Jack had started to comically voice concerns that without it people would think his character was bulemic due to a planned vomiting sequence that takes place early on post-opening credits chronologically. We shall see how things progress from here on out, but I’m hopeful the shooting will be completed sometime over the next two weeks.
