Filming Day

Instead of filming on the 29^th and 30^th as I originally had planned, I did all of my filming on the 30^th as weather forecast to be poor on the 29th. It was fairly dry on the 30^th however, which meant that filming could go ahead.

I also changed my location. Instead of filming in Bacton Woods like I had originally intended, I decided to film in a smaller location in North Walsham because it was more accessible and also, as I said, much smaller. This was beneficial because it meant that I could firstly find a location easier, and it also meant that once I had found a good location, I did not forget where it was!

Once we arrived at the location, I set out my props whilst my actress got dressed into the outfit I provided. I arranged various objects around the small set to ensure that they would be seen vaguely in the long shots, but not be too glaringly obvious as that might make them look too staged. I obviously wanted this to look as natural as I could.

Firstly I shot the scenes with Milly, who played Sadie, in. I initially did this because I was worried that she might get too cold whilst I shot them, but she seemed happy with being barefoot and wearing thin layers, which I figured would work to my advantage later on if I wanted to reshoot any scenes.

There was clay pigeon shooting near the location, but this was not to my disadvantage as I wanted to clip the audio from the footage anyway, to add a sense of detachment.

One problem I did have was how to do shots from low angles because of the length of the tripod legs. The uneven floor meant that I had some issues with being able to this even further. As a result I often had to lie on the floor, or hold the camera as still as I could, which proved to be very hard when I was crouching down.

It was also difficult to film the crucifix because the background of the shot was rather dark thanks to the plants there. It was a very small pendant and there was enough wind to make it difficult to film it. Hopefully this will not be too detrimental to the piece and to compensate I included two other scenes which were not included in either storyboard.

In the morning of the shoot I found a broken necklace of mine, which has a clockface on and looks similar to a pocketwatch on a silver grey chain. The clock had stopped working and the chain was broken so I smashed the glass of the clock face slightly and this actually proved to look very effective when placed on a crevice on a log in the location. This was one of the more difficult scenes to shoot due to how low down it was.

When walking home from the bus stop on the 26^th, I found a blown away piece of paper from the local newsagents. It was one of the adverts which showed the headline for the day, from the North Norfolk News. This particular advert said something along the lines of “Lovesick Woman Hounds Vicar”, which I thought actually seemed to have some strong links to my plot and hence I incorporated it into my filming. It was much easier than the clock to film because it was firstly much bigger and although it was on the ground, it was easy to shoot from higher up.

I had difficulty filming the scenes where Sadie has the earring in her hand because Milly (the actress) did not quite grasp how I wanted her to have her hand. Also, the earring was slightly smaller than anticipated so it was not as easy to film from above. The scene from lower down was hard as well, for reasons I mentioned previously.

However, most of this shoot went smoothly.

The second half of the filming on this day was also successful. I had originally put the polaroid camera in Harry's (the actor who played Aaron) hands and that was all for that shot, but I decided to have him pick it up and then open it so that it would look less like a photo and more like a memory.

I had some difficulting in filming the scenes revolving around the sink because it was hard to angle the camera and the tripod so that the legs were not in the shot and so that it did not wobble. I had to kneel on the counter to do this because I also needed to look at how the shot looked on the screen.

I had to use the remote to do a lot of the filming because of the reflective nature of the surfaces in my kitchen. This was not a bad thing however.

It was hard to make realistic looking fake blood but once I used caster sugar instead of granulated, I found a good mixture. However I did not make enough, in my opinion, so the scene where the blood goes down the plughole (scene 9 of the storyboard), was only shot a few times because not only did I not write down the recipe for the winning mixture, I ran out of red food colouring.

All in all though, my filming day went well and I managed to get everything that I wanted done.