Our Shoot: Behind The Scenes

This post goes into more detail about behind the scenes on the days before and the day of our shoot.

• What did you do the night before/Morning of?
The morning of the shoot, we made sure that everyone involved in the shoot met in good time before we needed to leave to go to location to ensure that everyone had everything they needed and to make sure we had time when we got to the Church. At the Church, we did the makeup for Hannah (the actress who played our victim). We decided that we would not use a makeup artist and instead a member of our production group, Vic, learnt how to do special effects makeup so that we could ensure that we got the exact look that we wanted


• What did you prepare before the shoot?
The days before our shoot, we collected all of the props and costumes that we needed for our shoot and kept them in a classroom so that they were all together and to minimize the risk of them getting lost or losing them on the day of the shoot. This meant that we were able to transport the things easily and everything was in one place for when we needed it on location. As a group we all did various bits of research to help make our thriller the best it could be. Nanci researched; hostage negotiation and the location of a church. I looked into what a psychopath was so that we could stay true to this with our actor and I researched famous film psychopaths to give our actor Mike some inspiration. Vic researched the location of a church and looked into how to do special effects makeup.
Doing this research before our shoot meant that we were well prepared and we were able to get  on with shooting in good time. The extra research also gave me ideas about what the actors should do and made sure that the dialogue we had written made sense for our characters.

• What did you do on set/location to create what you needed/wanted?

We were on location at a Church so we already had all the things that we needed. Because we hadn't actually visited the Church before, we had to spend some time looking around so that we could decide as a group, where we wanted the different shots to be filmed. Once we decided this, went went through the scene with our actors, just so they knew what they were doing but also so we could see what it would look like and if the layout worked. The Church had two different sections. The aisle led up to a higher up area with the alter, which is where we decided to film. This was ideal for what we needed because we could have the policeman walking up the aisle towards the hostage victim and the psychopath. This showed the audience that the psychopath had the ultimate power, because he was raised above the policeman with the hostage victim.  

• What took time at the start of the shoot?
The thing that took the most time at the start of the shoot was changing the lighting to ensure that everything could be seen on camera. As we were filming in a Church, we only had natural light and so we had to set up a few lights to make sure that all the shots could be seen, but we had to make sure it wasn't too light, otherwise the overall moss of the sequence would change.
Another thing that took time at the start of the shoot was setting up props and transporting them all to location. Our shoot involved quite a few props and especially makeup items so we had to make sure that  we had them all with us because we weren't able to go back and get them. In addition, we had to do Hannah's makeup on set to make sure it worked in the setting and with the lighting we had.


• What was the most difficult element of the shoot? For you and your group?
The most difficult element of the shoot was getting all the shots that we needed. The best way of filming was to not film the shots in order and so this made it more difficult to work out whether we had got everything that we needed before we finished and left the location. We also had to work around the fact that it was very cold in the church an so we had to make sure that our main actress (Hannah) didn't get too cold during the process as she was only wearing a white dress.


• How well did you think you did as a group?
I think we did well as a group because we were organised and we knew what we wanted to achieve and all the things we wanted to film. However, there was a communication issue as we did not talk and communicate as effectively as we could have and so that may have made the process more difficult.