Filming Blog: Pompano Beach and Sara's House

 October 5th, 2022

    Seeing as we had a Wednesday, October 5th off, we decided to film then. We agreed to go to Pompano Beach to film the "happy" part of the commercial and then we would walk the 20-minute walk back to my house where we would film the beginning and ending scenes. We agreed to meet up at 1:00pm however, Emma could only be there until 2:00pm, so in order to make sure she could be there for most of it, we couldn't mess around. My sister, Riley, agreed to be the sole actor in the commercial. I ended up bringing all the costumes, props, and tools we needed to film.

    We planned on filming on the beach itself but quickly realized there were two issues: the sand caused the video to be uneven and the wind was blowing the prop away. To fix this we moved to a grassy area right in front of the beach. The wind was less intense here and the ground was more stable. Then we ran into the issue of the lid of the donut box falling down. We resolved this by using Emma's water bottle to hold it up, while it wasn't stable it held long enough to get the shot.  We were able to finish this scene quickly, in about 20 minutes, and then decided to walk to my house to film the rest of the scenes. I have a white projector screen which worked as a perfect background for the scenes which were supposed to seem dull. However, the screen was right next to my pool, about 4 feet away. We had very little room and while awkward, we made it work. We quickly realized that the scene where Riley was supposed to grab the donut looked extremely awkward and choppy unless we used a tracking shot, shot from a high angle. However, the rest of the planned scenes went exactly as expected. We realized after reviewing all the shots we got that we may not have enough angles used if we decide to cut certain scenes. We were able to fix this by making two extra scenes with an over-the-shoulder angle of Riley eating the donut and a POV shot of her eating the donut. With the donut box, we got a dozen donuts (11 being glazed and 1 strawberry) but we almost ran out of strawberry frosted donuts because we had to reshoot shots.

    Even though we encountered some issues, I really did have a lot of fun making this. I got to spend time with people I wouldn't have thought I would be and I even got to spend more time with my sister (and had a wonderful excuse to boss her around). A benefit to choosing a donut commercial meant that we got to finish off the box in the end!