Filming time !

After months of people moving groups and ideas changing then endless planning and stalling we finally began filming at the start of February. Our original idea had been to use a car and some other things as the lightning from headlights would have been nice and effective but as we got closer to filming it became apparent this would not be possible so we had to create a whole new story which was loosely based on the same concept and with the same characters.

We began with shooting a indoors seen which would be our opening scene. This would set the mood for the ots and introduce our protagonist. We set up a nice amount of signifiers in the mise en scene to give the audience a general view and opinion of the protagonist as a stereotypical film noir character. This filming went very well and we completed the whole scene in just over an hour.

The next day we decided to try and finish the rest of the filming and to fit with general film noir conventions decided to do it at night. This however caused alot of lighting problems which can be seen clearly on Jamies blog here :
http://jamiesasmediablog.blogspot.com/2010/02/ots-lighting.html

Following the lighting disasters we decided to try again the next day a couple of hours earlier. This went well at first but after half an hour it rapidly became dark again which ruined continuity and made it impossible to film the climax of the scene.

Learning from the previous experiences on the 11th of February we arranged to meet in the afternoon and set out with filming it all in the daylight then planning to darken it in editing. This worked very well and despite panic with a race against the camera battery and countless dogs getting in our shots we managed to get the filming done fairly quickly and effectively. After reviewing the shots from the previous attempts we also filmed the pieces from the previous nights again just to eliminate any continuity issues that may have came up.