For my simulated work experience, I worked with people from the graduate film “Cookie” with Junyi Xie, Duo (Teddy) Xu, Kaori Watanabe with my course mate Peisen Dong.
The team wanted to shoot live action references for the film’s development to capture the movements and expressions of how they envisioned it. We used WhatsApp as a form of communication to start off and established to shoot references on a workday. We booked a studio space to film in for two hours, which was enough to capture scenes needed. The film is about an owner and their dog named Cookie running off from the tube station to a museum, the owner asking for help from the other background characters and museum statues to find their dog and them eventually finding Cookie.
The second-year students needed scenes with the tube, museum environments with the main character interacting with their dog and other characters mostly. When we met up, we established how we were going to film the references. When the camera was set up for filming, we took multiple shots to have different versions to work with later. I have made suggestions in-between shootings on how to make the angles and character interactions more interesting while considering if it makes sense and correlate with scenes next to it.
Helping with the shooting I practised my acting abilities, felt more confident working with people I have not interacted with before. It made me think about how to act in a more amusing way. We all switched roles in between characters so we had more variation of the same scene and analyse which version works best.
The interaction between all of us came easy and generally enjoyable, I was happy to help with them shooting references, giving suggestions and opportunity to act. We were able to finish filming what they needed. The Cookie team shared with us the content we developed, made sure the before and after process was clear and leaving positive feedback.