Planning and filming the first part of our film

Due to technical difficulties, this blog post has been posted a week after the filming was done.

On Saturday 19th November 2011 at 9am, Alex and I began filming for our main task. On this day, we filmed the first part of our opening title sequence.
From our own independent research, we have come to the conclusion we plan to film something within the thriller, mystery, crime, film noir genre. From our rough brainstorming (link here) we decided to follow our 'idea 3'.

Location
For our location, we chose a grass area in our town. At first we decided to shoot on the grassland but this caused a problem because the weather was very wet and cold and the grassland would not be ideal. Instead we found a better location which is a side of a street which fits the genre of a crime/mystery thriller because they are usually set in a City or town.
As part of a safety check to ensure the location was safe, both Alex and I made sure the actor would not be at any risk by lying on the floor. We checked for glass and other material (and dog poo) and once it was clear we knew the location was safe.


Here are some pictures of the location for this part of filming

 Actor
Our film focuses on a young male character who gets himself into a lot of trouble throughout the film. For the actor we decided that my cousin (Gavin) fitted the role of our character perfectly. After asking his permission to which he agreed, we chose him to act in our film.
Our actor fits the role of a young male as well as being easy to reach for filming for our course.

The opening of our film starts off from a flash forward of a scene that will occur again near the end of the film. Though the storyline has not been fully decided, we know that the character will have been injured in some way which will result in death or just serious injury because it fits in with the codes and conventions of crime/thriller/mystery. The character is in casual clothing because he did not know he was going to be attacked. We used some make up to create a black eye on and a bruised cheek.

Above is an image showing our character in full costume and below is a picture showing the actor's make up.

Mise-en-scene
Our lighting was determined by the natural light and because it was quite early on a morning, the light was quite bleak and plain with not too much sun or not too much rain. The natural lightening from the sun was enough to show that the time of this part of the film is early morning.

Props: Shoe from actor

Make-up of bruises and blood over face (picture above under 'Actor'). Costume of casual clothes.We decided the character would be in casual clothes because he is on the floor either dead or just severally injured. The character would not have known that he was going to be hurt by somebody so that is why  he is in his normal clothes


Camera Shots

In this scene we are going to have a voice over as part of our cold opening which we will plan later on. So our actor remained mute for this part of the production. But because of continuity, we had to make sure that our actor remained in the same postilion while we filmed different shots.


The only problem we faced was that at 9am on a Saturday morning there were people around who were walking their dogs to visit the downs. We overcame this by luckily being out of shot of the main pathway and had rehearsals in case a dog came over. Thankfully, no dog got in the way.