Account of shoot day.

The hectic week before the shoot day was filled with excitement, nerves, drawbacks and re-scheduling- but when I finally arrived to the night before, I was charged with a sense of eager anticipation for my first ever chance to direct a video of any kind.
The morning of the shoot day started with a large breakfast and gathering up all the props and our three actors. We also had to collect the keys to the car we had been promised and once we had them, Adam moved the car slightly to a more appropriate location for the boot scene. Once we started filming I had the pleasure of positioning myself in the boot of the car to film the protagonist POV shots. After a successful first part, we were ready to pack the kit into a mini-bus we were using and relocate to a nearby suburban road we previously decided to use for our jogging shots.

When filming the jogging sequence we remained almost completely faithful to the story boards, where we only changed one shot to include both antagonists, instead of just a close-up. My favourite part of filming the jogging was setting up the camera in the bus and then driving alongside the protagonist actor whilst tilting the camera up and down to create an effective pan shot. We took several takes of each shot to ensure we had the best quality film we could produce. We then packed up our kit once again and moved to Adams house to set up for the torture scene which would take up the rest of the day, before going back to school and having lunch with the actors; which was all on our shooting schedule.

After a large meal we were ready to take on the most challenging shot sequence so far, and after checking that there were no extra props we needed from school: we headed back to Adams’ to finish the shoot.
The position we had previously set the lights up in, gave the room a musky warm feeling, and along with the sandy red bricks which were part of the location, I was happy with the atmosphere we had built the shoot in.
We shot the torture sequence in near chronological order due to the fact that as the scene goes on, more fake blood is used, so it was more efficient opposed to then cleaning up the blood after every after every shot. We again remained fairly faithful to the story boards, changing several things if any one in the group had sudden inspiration. One thing we decided to do on the day was a torture method which included the use of fake nails. We then realised the potential of the method, but due to the fact that it had not been pre-planned, it looked to fake to use in the video.
Other torture methods we used included the use of a hammer, a metal bar, a Stanley knife and a power drill. We shot each different torture from various different angels to attain the fact that we would have choices in the edit suite. After hours of hard work we had a good amount of film to begin editing and we were all happy with what had taken place.

Overall I am very happy with what transpired on the shoot day and while I learnt many lessons in the importance of pre-planning and organisation, I thoroughly enjoyed directing my first ever video.