Account of the shooting day

Today we shot our film and to the pride of our group it went very well and as planned. Infact it actually went better than planned and exceeded our expectations. Whilst we went in today not knowing exactly how we were going to execute the film, it soon came to fruition when we were filming it as we could see the location before us which gave us an idea of how to map out what we were doing on our terrain. When compared to the storyboards, whilst not being completely the same what we filmed yesterday very much resembles what was written on the storyboard. This means that there is still a victim being chased by an attacker which is himself. The only thing that changed was the ending and how that worked out. This will explained towards the end of this post.

The main shot choices that we used were fast tracking shots and close ups. The main tracking shots we had were towards the beginning of the film we follow Dan running through the forest. The close up is seen at the end in which we had evil Dan about to stab good Dan. The final shot we used, which as team believe to be the best one is a POV shot which shows the camera running through the woods as if to be Dan running away from Evil Dan. This was the hardest to execute as there were many twigs in the way which ended up tripping us up (we all had a turn at doing it). Whilst it was difficult we believe they will truly show off the film when they are edited together.

In terms of location we filmed it in the nearby woods. Whilst there are many woodland areas in the surrounding areas of surrey, we used the woods nearest as that would take us the least amount of time to travel towards, and would therefore allow us to film as much as possible with it still being light. It turns out that the forest we used was a good location as it wasnt too enclosed and gave us a lot of room to move about in, this was good for being able to film and for Dan when he was being filmed. The mise en scene of the particular woods was good as well as they made it look like Dan was very much on his own, lost and hunted. People often tend to think of more rural settings as well when thinking of such themes like being hunted and primal fear which is what the main themes of our movie were about.

Unfortunately megan knowles had to cancel at the last minute (literally being yesterday), so we had to substitute for her with Dan Ash. This turned out to be a bit of a blessing as dan has done a lot of acting before over various different student projects. This benefitted our film hugely as having a good actor does wonders for its look.
We were given a large amount of fake blood which was used to full effect as Dan put a large amount in his mouth and then spat it out to make it look as if he was suffering from profuse internal bleeding. We also dabbed a large amount below his chest to make it look as if he had been stabbed.

In terms of lighting it was all natural and was purely created from the sun shining down on the forest. This gave it an eerie quality that we would not have been able to attain if we had used the fake lighting that we were originally offered. Once again like was mentioned before the main theme of this film is being hunted, and fear which is a very natural emotion. The whole film is about instinct which is something which occurs naturally, so we thought adding light to this could end up ruining this idea.

We did not use any sounds on the day but they will be edited in later on during the editing process.

My role on the day was not huge as i am the sound engineer. I did however help out with the camera work and filmed several sequences. We all had our fair share of filming the piece however this all helped add to the constructivity of the piece. We all get on as a team and therefore found it easy to work together and managed to give each other ideas on what to day with the camera nad how we could film it. An example of this is charlotte who came up with the idea to shoot dan coming up to victor whilst wearing a hoody. This will be expanded on later.

As said before we all get on very well which hugely helps the equilibrium of the team and helped bring the idea to reality. We all came up with individual ideas that helped add to the piece and this all helped mould the finished product that we will soon have.

Like was said before we were still having trouble trying to decide how we were going to edit the film as we were still not 100% sure about the idea. Before we decided on the ending it was orginally going to be a POV shot of dan being stabbed by himself. On the day however we got victor to wear a hoody and dan to wear a hoody so that it looked like the killer is about to stab the victim again. We then got dan to pull down his hoody to reveal that he was the killer all along. During the editing phase we will then cut to the titles when the audience realise that the killer and victim are the same person.