Panasonic GH2 and eating snakes

I had a full filming day on Sunday doing another film that will be integrated in theater piece.

We had three locations, first Coombe Abbey park where we had some scenes with the two actors being children; this will be seen as a memory in the performance, that will explain some of the things said in the live show.

The second location was in a kitchen, where the guy had to cook a snake and then eat it. (the boy bought a pet snake without his parents knowing and didn't know how to get rid of it so this is what he chose to do). I wasn't in charge of props but I helped in the process of deciding what they could use as a snake (no worries it wasn't a real one). In the end we used a jelly snake that we actually cooked in oil and then ate it. It looked like burnt sugar, all brown and stringy like cheese, quite horrible to watch and even worse to eat, but for the sake of the film it gave a really good effect as it looked like snake skin or guts.

And the third location was the Reptile Shop where the brother and sister went to look at snakes. The final narrative will be showing the girl and the boy playing in the park. The girl asks the mummy to go and see the animals, and they go to the reptile room. There she gets scared and runs away, and she gets lost in the forest of the zoo. We couldn't get permission to film in a zoo so we had to improvise, and use two different locations for the zoo and the inside of the reptile house.

It was very interesting to film as for the most of it I had to shoot it as a home video, as I was the mother filming the two children playing in the park. It's hard to film badly when you have prior experience in filming good. It was quite enjoyable in the end trying to make it look bad; I was zooming in a lot on their faces, some of it is out of focus, in the beginning I left the lens cap on and at the end the camera is still rolling filming the floor as I help "my daughter" get down from a swing.

For the other two locations I used normal shots, close-ups and extreme close-ups mainly.

It was my first time using the Panasonic GH2. I got to play with it a bit the night before when I went to work at the Club where I work as a Photographer and got some shots there. I was interested to see how it looks in that kind of lighting environment and I am quite impressed. It doesn't look bad at all. Plus the pictures look good as well. I will have to look in more details at them, see how grainy they went with the different ISOs.

But for the filming of the film on Sunday it was quite good. I'm obviously not used to the buttons and settings so I did struggle a bit but that takes practice. The one thing I found with it is that it's a bit too small. I seem to work better with a camera when it's heavier as it is more still; this one was quite light so at some points it's a bit shaky. The live view screen did help at some of the shots where I had to use angles that would have been a bit harder to see on the 5D for example. In the end the quality of the footage is more important that the interface or settings, and I am pleased with it.