Short Film | Day 1

On 18th November, Alex and I attempted filming our first lot of footage for our short film. We invited our main antagonist character actor Harry to play the role for Igor for the first scene on the top floor of the Princesshay car park in Exeter. The role of the filming day was to test out firstly whether the equipment we are planning to use works properly since it has almost been a year since Alex and I had made our Opening Sequence at AS and secondly to gather some footage to present to our audiences for more feedback.

When we arrived, we were very lucky to see that there were no cars in the car park. This was the idealistic situation for us both since we could film without any interruptions from the other members of the public. Based on the rough storyboard we drew, we headed over to the lift and got Harry to practise the first few scenes with him coming up the lift in sync to our recording. After several attempts, we soon realised that his was becoming increasing difficult due to people flooding in for the lifts and stairs as the morning progressed and the car parks started to fill up. It wasn't easy for us to signal each other when it was safe to come up the lift and when the entrances where clear of people. We tried this many times but the car park was just getting more and more full with shoppers so there was more interruptions as morning progressed as well as the weather getting worse.

Here is a clip of Harry going the up the stairs following the original idea we had in mind for our storyboard.

Alex and I quickly changed our idea on the spot of using the elevator for our character to enter the scene and instead introduce him by pulling the camera back over his shoulder as he looks over the city centre. As more cars began to fill the car park, the weather slowly got sunnier which was a slight flaw since we wanted this entire scene to appear dark and gloomy, like a typical British Gangster film. In my opinion, the sunny weather didn't reflect the expensive and high class portrayal of our character however Alex and I both share different views on this subject matter.

After around an hour of experimenting with footage and positioning of our character in relation to the environment, we managed to gather some test footage which we could present to our audience and receive helpful feedback to see what we could build on further for the rest of the short film.