Reccy Work

As previously noted Lewis, Jordan and I had arranged a reccy each of our locations in a certain order, beginning with mine then Lewis and to finish off with Jordan’s.

My Reccy

Unfortunately Jordan was unable to join us on this reccy as he wasn’t feeling too well so it was left to just Lewis and I to work on it which turned out to be an issue for two reasons, the first being at times I needed two stand ins to practice the shot and sometimes I wanted to ask for feedback on certain shots from another member of the group.  The second reason is that I needed  to spend some time going over with Brian (our technician)  the shot I was previously struggling with which is the zoom into the eyes then zoom out. He showed me a number of techniques to achieve this well with both the camera and editing process. Once we have gained all the shots we need, we will most likely be using the editing technique to achieve our desired shot.

My locations are based around my house so it was easy to arrange transport for us and arrived swiftly. We started off by having a brief production meeting about time framing our shooting days; it made it difficult to do considering Jordan couldn’t give us his estimate time frame. Considering how much time we had left we decided that we could do all of our shoots within a week. Estimating mine I guessed I would need two days of shooting and one more as backup, Lewis needed two days and one back up as well. With Jordan’s we estimated that it could potentially be shot in one day if not two as a precaution.

Once we had dealt with that, we began positioning the camera and actor for the bedroom scene, whilst practicing this I realised that lighting is going to be a difficult element that I will have to spend a lot of time practicing with.  Originally the mother comes in and opens the curtain allowing natural lighting into the room but the change on the camera settings has a dramatic difference from before and after, so instead I am going to keep that specific curtain open slightly whilst allowing another source of light in the room.

I had my mother stand in as the character mum as she was available to help out at this moment in time. Once we had finished that we practised all the scenes which included  just the characters Tom and Mum are involved in, as that was all I could do without another stand in. Also I participated by playing as the stepdad for this, it was a bit difficult setting up the shot then taking position as the character but we eventually sorted it. We then went outside to work on those scenes which I am more worried about, these scenes are set late at night but due to the time of year we have to make our pieces it means a late night shoot which may cause some concerns for the actors. Also lighting will be an issue, outside there are security lights which will help but I am unsure if they will be enough.

Once we did that we started to re-arrange the basement so that the actors have enough room to work in and so that we have enough room to set up lighting and camera positions.  Some areas will be difficult to work in but will be worth achieving.  However we weren’t able to finish as Lewis had to leave due to family commitments so we decided to finish rearrange another day. 

 

 

 

Lewis’s reccy

For Lewis’s reccy we asked another member of media to join as we needed a female stand in for the practice shots. We asked Georgina Hunt to join us. Lewis has two main locations that we had to reccy but one was some distance away and we wouldn’t be able to reccy until the weekend so we just did the first house location. We arrived fairly early but had to wait for a bit as the mother had a personal matter to attend and us practicing would have had distracted her. Luckily Jordan was able to join us today and helped out by standing in as the main character (the husband) and Georgina played the female protagonist (the wife).

Once I had a look at the main room we would be working in, I got a bit worried due to space and prop placement. We needed a desk area which a woman would be expected to do her make up at, the only area we could do this was blocked by a television. So we decided on the day we would remove the television and then replace it with a desk. But for today we just pretended a desk was in place and got the shots which would be needed on the day. 

It didn’t take that much time to gather all the necessary shots but we had some concerns when we acted out the “real incident” scene, where we see what actually happened the night the wife died. In the edit process we will see snippets of the incident which means continuity would be much of a factor but we wanted that realistic aspect of murder so with Georgia’s permission we throw her around as if she was the wife which was a lot of fun, we realised positioning is key to achieve this scene authentically. 

Jordan’s reccy

Unfortunately we wasn’t  able to commence with Jordan’s reccy seeing as the locations occupier had left on holiday which means we will have to arrange another day to reccy it, however I see that will be extremely busy after this week with our projects that he may have to did it himself.

So at the moment we are slightly behind schedule by not attending Jordan’s reccy but due to the fact Jordan’s is so simple location wise, it shouldn’t affect us too much. From here I am going to start recruiting actors to perform the roles, as I previously mentioned I will be most likely recruiting them from the website http://www.starnow.co.uk.