Account of shoot day

Our group shot in the Studio throughout the morning, till around lunch time when we shot in an external location Guildford. We wanted to create the image of a really run down bedroom. We managed to print of images and maps of things relevant to local bombings and locations. We spent most of the morning touching up the set and putting the pictures up, making the beds etc. As most of the other people followed there storyboard throughout the day, unfortunately our plan changed quite dramatically and so we didn’t follow it up at all. I feel that we were very much prepared for the day, we had all of our props ready and had sorted actors and locations early on. However it would have been better if our idea had some relevance to our storyboard.

Our shot choices varied quite a lot throughout each shot and therefore we ended up with a huge amount of shots at different angles etc, most of which were extreme close ups of the actor making the bomb, For our external shots we followed the subject by the method of tracking. We also found that playing around with the focus made our shots look like a lot of panic and tension, therefore it worked well. Overall I think our shots went well, however we did have a lot of extreme close ups and could have done a few more which weren’t in this genre.

We chose our location in the studio because it wasn’t actually anyone’s room, therefore we could change it to however we wanted it to be, we painted the walls, and had someone build us a set. We could control the lighting and sounds in there too. We then chose Guildford as our other location as we wanted a busy street with people walking through a city centre. This was done to show the tension of the man walking through the streets, without people knowing he was an actual bomber. It created a lot more suspense in the film. However, the down side to this, was that people who know we were filming could have made faces towards the camera and stared at us, therefore could make it not look as good as we wanted it too, luckily know one was like this and it all turned out like we wanted it too.

For our props, we made a bomb constructed out of wires, an old mobile phone taken apart, and marzipan for the explosive. The room consisted of a laptop on the desk, a bed on the floor with a sleeping bag, images on the walls, a teddy bear, desk and a pillow. Clothing was kept looking normal, which gave the audience more chance of believing he was a suicide bomber.

For our casting choices, we wanted a slightly older actor, who would be more realistic in making a bomb … we felt we wanted someone who looked middle Eastern, however we didn’t manage to find anyone, therefore we made do with our original actor and made him wear a hat. At the end of the shoot I felt that it all worked out well and that our actor looked really good.

I did the lighting in the shoot, at first we just had it on a dim shoot, and however we then discovered that if we swung the light from side to side, and had it from light to dark it looked really well. It looked really different and created a lot more suspense rather than how it looked before the flashing lights.

We didn’t record any sound at the time as we plan to cover it with our own soundtrack.

In the shoot I did the lighting and put the props together in the set, I then helped on which shots we should do and in which angles etc. I tried to be as creative as possible. I felt that our group worked well as a team most of the time; however certain members of the group tried to take more responsibility than others and didn’t give other people a chance to try things. However apart from that it went well.

I was relatively happy with the overall result at the end of the day , our footage didn’t meet our storyboard, however our new storyboard fits it very well.