4/12/09

Today was the first lesson we would be filming the majority of our film. We collected the equipment we needed and headed off to our locations with the permission slips we needed. We had originally chosen to film in a spooky dark track near Jayke’s Grandfather’s house but this wasn’t possible as we couldn’t get an exact address to get permission, to solve this problem we found a spotted a location by the Weir in Bath and we had a man named Chris from suited and Booted with us who said as long as we didn’t disturb the public it would be ok to film there. As it was fairly quiet we decided to fill in some gaps than would be missing on the storyboard such as parts linking scenes to other scenes. We tried out a couple of spooky techniques such as filming the same shot twice with actors missing in one so that once edited it showed an actor disappearing into thin air. The filming in this location I feel was the most successful and achieved some really good effects which, after editing, would add to the eerie atmosphere of our film. Chris was very helpful and even willing to get involved in our film I found his help encourages us to look at things differently and try out different techniques.
The next location we were filming at was Widcombe Cemetery. Around halfway there we discovered problems with the equipment being quite heavy and awkward to carry, we passed a small church called St. Micheal's church with a graveyard and discussed the option of changing our location. After enquiring within the church to get permission and informing the tutor of our change of plans we commenced filming there. This filming went very well we did a few takes to ensure we had enough to work with. At one point a problem was that some kids were kicking a football around and getting it in shot. To avoid this we were going to mover the tripod with the camera but they went away.
To get to our next location we had to get a taxi as it was quite far away, we did more filming here than what was expected and included a lot of the storyboard in this part of the day. I was in a few of the shots and as it was the opening shot it was fairly important. We tried different camera angles and various compositions of the shot, we also thought about make-up as I had to look dead. I think this went quite well and we got some really effective shots relevant to our theme and storyline. While I was not in shot I took charge of directing as by this time our director had left the course. I made sure the shots were kept relevant to the storyboard and I also wanted to watch and learn what was going on with the camera.