Locations (Part 1)

OK so I have my idea and ive been working with a handful of locations and ideas which Im about to run through:

To start I needed a deserted, run-down area to open up the shot of the car and to start this was an issue as there arent really any areas of that description around me. However I first heard of a lone road in Bicester called Gavray Drive which had a bit of a story behind it, that when building the road they ran out of budget for it and just simply stopped bulilding it. If you go there and have a look its a long road, with a few turns off to housing estates but make it all the way down it just stops at a few trees. There are even a few un-operational street lights. It looked really good but I eventually ended up using another location which I will talk about but I think I may use this location still as it really does have that eerie, abandoned feel.

The main location I used for the intro is a place in Upper Heyford very close to the Upper Heyford RAF Air Base and even closer to where my main actor in my film lives. There is the most perfect location there: a fenced off, derelict and abandoned supermarket, including a decent sized carpark. Even the sign just reads "We come To Y ur Superm rket". Its something you can picture out of a zombie/postapocolyptic movie. We needed permission to use the area because it was still private property but they let us use it, I set the car up in there and have Corban sit in the car and I readied the camera. I could'nt ask for a better starting location.

Main Task: Locations

Our film consists of 2 half's essentially: The pub and the flashbacks. The flashbacks took place in a few locations but as far as locations went finding a decent pub was our priority. We needed a simple pub, not too glamorous like a night bar, with a few tables and a quiet atmosphere. We started looking around in Bicester for a suitable pub because Bicester was where we all lived or lived near so it would be easy to film the shoot out of school time.

The difficulty we had was that every pub we rang were busy with events and/or parties on the dates that we needed. We rang the the Black Bull-Launton, The Bure Farm-Bure Park and the White Hart-Glory Farm but all were busy. We then decided to move onto pubs around Woodstock and instead of filming out of school we would film in school, when we all had free periods. This was probably the best option because on the day of doing the pub shoot it was around 10 o'clock which was good because it meant the pub would only have a handful of people stopping for breakfast, providing us with the quiet atmosphere we needed.

We were a lot more successful when it came to asking pubs in Woodstock because every pub we asked said we were allowed to film there which was great. We had a choice between The Kings Arms, The Star Inn and amazingly even The Bear Hotel said they would let us. Ultimately we chose the Kings Arms because it had the more simple image we were looking for out of the 3, the Star Inn did have a good image but it was a little too dark for our liking. Sure it would have helped create a better atmosphere for the film but we needed a light atmosphere to contrast with the theme so the dark tone was more unexpected.

Our main location was set we then needed to think about the locations of our flashback scenes. In our flashbacks we have a police interrogation scene, a swing and a bathroom. We needed a park for the swing which ended up being the park outside our school back field, this was an easy 5 mins of filming. The interrogation scene was the only location you could really call a set because we had to make our own scene seeing as we didn't have a police station to film in. For this shoot we used our drama studio at school, turned off all the lights so the only light was the lamp on the table, found an old tape player which worked as the recording equipment on an interrogators table, 2 chairs and we were set. It was simple but it worked really well, the whole rooms lighting only being that lamp really helped with the atmosphere. We then needed a bathroom for the last 30 seconds of the film. We simply used the toilets at school, they had a handful of sinks and mirrors which was all we needed. We decided after a small incident that it was best to film this after school, because one lunch time when we were trying to film a shot someone in our 6th form walked in, turned straight back out and just as a joke told everyone we were filming dirty scenes together in the toilets... Funny times.