Blogging the shoot

We decided to shoot our thriller on a Saturday from 10am-3pm. We all meet at 10am and went to Charlie’s house; however the female actor who was playing the dead lady was late so we had to wait for her before shooting. After about 45 minutes she still hadn’t turned up, so instead we decided that we would film the flickering light at the start of the opening for the titles and also the opening sequence of the man washing the blood off his hands. The sequence turned out quite well, however the camera wasn’t completely steady, which could be seen very clearly when we watched the footage back, and also we didn’t achieve all of the shots that we had originally planned to get. However the actor, Jake, was very good and it was easy to tell him what we wanted him to do and how we wanted it to look on camera. Finally our female actor turned up so we was able to shoot the rest of the scenes. We also decided that we was going to use both a baby and an animal in our thriller, however this instantly came with its own problems. For example when we was trying to film the cat we found it hard to get the right shot and had to do several before we got a descent shot. Then with the baby, we collected him at 10am but then because we was late shooting the thriller, Luke started to get very tired and cry, which then made it very hard for us to get him to do what we wanted and when we wanted him to do things, and this started to make everyone frustrated and annoyed because we only had a few more scenes left to shoot. Another problem we had we that was rushed a lot of the scenes and because of this we got things in the shot that wasn’t meant to be there, like people’s shoes and their legs. When we then watched back all of our footage we then realised this and realised that we needed to spend a lot more time and care about our shooting. So we then decided that we was going to have to re shoot the opening of our thriller otherwise it would look really bad.

There were quite a few things that I think we could have done better, for example take a lot more care and time when preparing to shot a scene and also practise it a lot more before actually recording it. Another thing we need to improve on is making sure we record each scene at least two or three times just to make sure that we have enough footage to then pick from when were editing it all together.


We then re-shot the whole opening of the thriller a few weeks later on a Saturday, but this time relocated to Sam's house, got two new actors, Amy and Joe and also got rid of working with the baby and cat. Overall I think this shot went a lot better because we took a lot more care and time over each scene, got a lot more footage for us to choose from when we edit it into our thriller and also we all took equal amounts of time filming and using the camera. We arrived at Sam's house at 10, however realised that we didn't have a tape, so we got a bus to Charlie's house to pick up a spare tape that he had. Also because we decided to get rid of the baby and cat we replaced these shots with flashbacks of the couples home life and memories together, like walking down the street, watching TV and making a cup of tea. We then did sequences of him punching and kicking Amy to show how she finally ended up laying dead on the floor. After we had filmed the flashbacks we moved on and filmed Amy laying in the floor dead with makeup on to make it look a lot more realistic. After that we filmed both the sequence of the boyfriend/murderer realising what he has done and him washing all the blood of this hands etc. The actors were very easy to work with and did a better job than the last ones because they were very believable when acting and also took direction very well. It also helped because Amy is in technical theatre so was good with doing the makeup on her face to make it look like she had been beaten up and killed. We learnt from our mistakes from the last shoot and was a lot more pleased with what we had when we watched it all back. However there was also a few problems, for example we had to work without a base plate on the tripod and at one point used Charlie's camera to film a few shots, which isn't HD so we had a few problems log and capturing it onto the computer and the way it has come out. For the thriller I filmed parts such as the flashbacks of the couple, a few of the bathroom scenes and Amy's dead body on the floor and when I wasn't filming I helped the group with either the microphone or the lighting in the room.