Preparing for IY

Doing a full length film project is a serious business. It is a daunting task to keep the production on budget and on time. More than the art aspect it is also commerce. It requires discipline and careful planning especially when you want your material to reach a wide audience.After more than 15 years of doing TV commercials, Inang Yaya is indeed a welcome break for Ronnie and me. Our TV commercial experience at Unitel helped us greatly in providing measures that would keep us on track for the duration of the shoot not only in making sure we have the appropriate visual translation of the script. We tried our very best to plan each sequence, each shot before the first day of shoot.

Scene 9. Location check photo / Scene 9. Photoboard

After breaking down the script and finalizing our locations for most of the scenes, we tried to pre-visualize each scene- the blocking of the actors, camera movement and lensing. We did several visits of the final locations along with the Gary Gardoce, our director of photography and his gaffer, Jeff Baltazar and production designer, Reji Regalado. We brought along video and still cameras, viewfinder and a cine lens set to simulate every shot. Making the photoboard and floorplan really made a major difference, technical difficulties and other concerns were more or less settled before actual photography. There were less discussions on the set giving more time in fine tuning the blocking/camera work of each scene and more time for rehearsals.

Scene 9. Floor plan / Scene 9. Actual shoot (BTS shot)

It was an enjoyable and worthwhile experience. If given the chance to do another film I would devote more time and effort to the pre-visualization stage.This is part of our commitment to our producers to make sure that every aspect of the project is in order. This is also our way of taking care of our talents, especially our actors Maricel Soriano, Tala Santos, Erika Oreta and our staff and crew. This is our way of paying them back for their untiring commitment to this project. There are snags but most of the time we still finish each shooting day with enough time to rest and regain our strength for the next shooting day.