Response to Rehearsal

Overall, the rehearsal went well despite the fact that I was in an uncontrolled environment. Since I was filming at Shelby Farms and the horse area happens to be right next to the dog area, the dog people often come over and sit on the obstacles we need to film and will walk on the path in the way of the oncoming horse. Luckily, the obstacles we were filming had no one around and of the obstacles that people were on or around, such as the oxer, they were very good about moving out of our way. I am hoping we will have the same success next week. So, in the end, location was not a problem despite the issues at hand.

Next, the horse was extremely well behaved and easy to work with. While both the rider and I are very familiar with this particular horse, anything can still happen when working with an animal. The abundant amount of dogs and people worried us but the horse paid them no mind and did the job at hand. We did experience issues with people wanting to come up and pet the horse and we had to politely inform them that this was a working animal. 

Another concern was the rider. We did discover that I, as a director, needed to give more exact directions for starts and stops, however, the rider was extremely cooperative and did an excellent job despite all the distractions and lack of direction on my part.

The major issue with the shoot was that the sound was not working. The boom operator and I spent hours trying to figure out what was not functional and we came to no accurate conclusion. We are hoping that it is operator error and that we will solve our issues by next shoot, however, we are concerned that there is a possibility that something may be wrong with the equipment. Once again, we hope it is operator error.

As far as shots were concerned, we may have to rethink our tracking shot via car since we were informed that we needed a permit to drive on the field. The truck that hauls the horse trailer does have a permit and may be used, however, we would like to avoid unhooking it from the trailer if possible. Our tracking shot may end up in a running tracking shot (I mean, literally, running) or we will use a different type of shot to achieve our desired effect. The other shots were successful however. We were able to safely wedge the camera into obstacles to get interesting shots and film the obstacles at different angles without issue. The horse did not react to any of the equipment since we did introduce it to him before the shooting began.

We are eliminating the scene with the person actually counting down, however, the voice over for the count down will still remain. By doing this, I am attempting to show how this is about the mind of the rider and their memory, not necessarily the actual event as it happened.

Overall, as long as weather is not an issue, filming this should be successful as planned.