Film Day

Our film day didn't start as we wanted. The costumes we ordered hadn't arrived and one of our extras was ill so she couldn't take part in the film. We had to go to a teacher in the costume department and see if she had any white overall suits and then head to the biology classrooms and ask to borrow some of their protective eye goggles. Luckily both of these teachers allowed us to use them for the day. As for the cast members, we had issue with our taxi driver and had to ask another teacher to step in for him but he was happy to do it so we now had our full cast as I had to step in for the girl that was ill. We had our main character, Tally Goss, our taxi driver, Jake Pratt and our investigators, Annie Youngman and Ciara Proctor.

Around 10:30 we headed to our first location which was one of the boarding houses, Peaslake, where we used the woods at the back of the house. We set up the police tape in an area where we thought would look good for her to end up dead, and began to film that part of the sequence first. We filmed lots of still shots of 'dead' body. Close ups of her hair, her hands and shoes. We then used panning shots to reveal the whole body and then introduced the investigators to the scene. we had them walking from the background coming into the foreground of the shot where the body was and then they crouched down next to the body to investigate her body by slowly testing for a pulse and looking for marks of how she could have died. We filmed this scene for around 45 minutes to an hour as we were getting used to using the camera. The final shot we did was the revealing of her face as one of the investigators lifted the hair off of her face to show her facial expression.

As it was very cold and damp on the day we filmed we had to take a 20 minute break to warm up all of our actors, especially our main character Tally who was laid on the wet ground for a long period of time.

After the break we then went on to film the running through the woods scene, we did tracking shots of her feet which then panned up to show where she was running and used quite a few close ups of her face as she was running to see the terror that was presented from her running away from her taxi driver. We also got Max, one of our group members to run infront and behind her with the camera so that the audience can get the feel that someone is actually chasing her. These shots worked really well for the effect we wanted. We had to take quite a lot of precautions for the running shots to make sure that she wouldn't trip and fall over and potentially really hurt herself, so before she would run we would go round the path she'd take and clear our any big sticks or sharp items that were on the floor and for when max was filming while running backwards 2 of us ran back with him to make sure he wouldn't trip or fall over with the camera.

Once we had finished all the wood scenes, it was time for lunch so we headed back to school to go and eat and then we met back up at 2 o'clock. We did have to return to the woods for a little bit after lunch just to get some final shots and foley sounds. We filmed a reaction shot of her seeing the taxi driver who is chasing her. We made sure only she was facing the camera to keep the mystery of who the man is. We made the shot really tight on her face and only had the corner of his jacket in the shot so we could emphasise her facial expression.

Once the wood scenes were complete we headed back to school and went to the studio, at the side of the studio there is a ramp where we parked our teacher Lukes car to film inside it. We used black gel sheets to cover the windows of the car so the inside wouldn't look like it was day time. These sheets were really effective especially with the outer light we used to mimic cars going by. For this we just took the light and manually turned it every few seconds to look like the car was passing by. We did a lot of close ups on Jake's hands to make him seem more creepy as he would tightly grip the steering wheel. We also did a close up of him looking back at Tally in the car just to emphasise the mystery of what could happen. As for Tally we did close ups of her hands and her scared face looking out the window, to show her confusion and emotion she felt. There was a lot of shots of her nervously moving, like fiddling with her phone and hands and close up of her eyes.

To wrap up the day, after dinner, we could only take a skeleton crew out to film at night time. We filmed the roads and passing cars to make it actually seem like they are in a moving car even though the car scene was shot stationary. Because it was dark, we altered the exposure on the camera and with the head lights passing trees and the woods it made it feel very eery.