Progress Update 9 - The Start of the Process

During the half term break, my group and I were able to go to soar lane and begin the filming of our main production. We chose to go on Monday the 12th of March for a few reasons; firstly, it was one of the few days in the holiday that we were all available and we figured that because it is a Monday, our locations would not be really crowded. Furthermore, we looked at the weather forecast and decided that it was the most fitting weather of the holiday for the mood and tone of the film:

Despite the forecast drizzle, we hardly saw more than a few drops at times this turned out to be perfect lighting with the use of a few filters on the camera lens and we were really happy with this. Each group member dedicated the weekend leading up to the 12th learning the script inside out to ensure maximum efficiency with the time that we had to spend there. We arrived at about 10:00am and got straight into filming. This was because we were not sure if we would be able to return again in the near future and we liked the lighting so much.

Our first location was the Ship Inn abandoned pub at the top of Soar Lane. We managed to get a lot of varied takes on this sequence in quick succession with high efficiency and had soon moved on from this location within the hour.

From here, we moved onto the shots on the raised platform on Soar Lane where my character and Morgan's character have a two-shot focusing on the scenery. This shot was something we spent a lot of time on because it is a tracking shot which turns into a steady shot of us. We were originally going to use a tripod for this shot but decided that we didn't agree with how the still shot felt and the transition from a tracking shot to a stationary shot so we changed it to a handheld camera shot and we agreed with this much more.

As the day progressed, the lighting changed as it naturally does and we found that changing the filter on the camera sorted this out quite well, there may be a slight change in the lighting but it isn't really noticeable.

We then progressed on to the sequence at the bench on Soar Lane, where all of the dialogue of our film takes place. We spent roughly an hour going over lines, setting up our equipment and just generally preparing for the next bit of filming. We were originally going to use a telescopic lens and a tripod for this sequence but we felt like it lacked depth of field and couldn't quite get the angle we wanted, so we reverted back to hand held and we ended up enjoying and agreeing with this much more. I have not acted before and gave it my best go, I feel like I did a good job.

Jake, our Director of Photography, took many opportunities to capture a lot of footage during breaks in acting and moving from location to location and we have now got more than enough footage to almost finish the production but we will likely go back to the location some time in the near future as well as our other shooting locations. We managed to obtain roughly 6 or 7 takes of each sequence so we can chose our favourite version of each and manipulate this into our production.

We did run into a few issues, one being withing the parking of my car when we got to the location, each of us had forgot to bring any change! Perhaps the most frustrating however, is that we forgot to take the microphone and this left us with footage of the parts with dialogue without any sound, so we have to go back to fix this. 

The next steps for our group is to begin the editing of our footage, which we have already managed to get a jump start on this.