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.

A2 Production Update

It's been a while but I'm back! And with news. I will post the updates in their own sections but for now I will say that progress has been made. Before, the story was fairly complicated and I had always wanted to simplify it so now the story is as follows:

Our character wakes up in a car. In an abandoned car park. Just this will give you an idea of how the film will look. We have no names and no dialogue for the first part. He makes his way out and stumbles around shouting for any life. Through the shot we can tell someone is watching him and our main character sees a glimpse and begins to run. He makes his way to an abandoned street, sounds of ambulances and sirens and crashes can be heard in the background, he makes his way up the street to see a lone busker on the other side of the street playing (track undecided) and just looking at him as he walks past. They exchange glances with an almost desperation to communicate but they don't, as our character walks off the music dies off in the distance. The pace picks up slightly as our character grows more nervous of who or what is following. He eventually ends up along an alley with the one door in the side of the building. With no where else to go he enters and stops dead as he comes out. He ends up in the same car park he was before looking at himself in the car, as he was earlier. The story goes around in a circle.

Deep stuff, kind of. More updates on the way!

A2 Production Experiment Shots

In the next 2 weeks I plan to spend an hour or more at a particular location just experimenting with a few shots so I can have an idea of how i might want a scene in the film to look. My production doesnt go to crazy with locations, infact they're quite basic. So far I only need a living room (it will technically be a flat but I only really need a living room with a TV) and a fairly busy urban area, just a town will do. There will be other locations but I will be more clear with those as I have more ideas for the film. I might possibly need a few houses, a work-place and more urban areas. For now I think I will only be trying a few shots of my main character walking from one house to the other through the town. I want to be able to perfect filming a character through a town but being able to show which person is the main character. I also want to be able to see how I can that the character is troubled, almost out of place.

I will try this this weekend, come back with a simple range of shots and upload them. I shall report back then with those shots and hopefully i'll have more of an idea how I want the scene to act out.

A2 Production Concepts and Ideas

For our AS brief we were asked to make a 2 minute thriller film opening and I really enjoyed this brief as I love thriller films (esp. psychological thrillers) and I decided for the A2 brief to choose the 5 minute short film in its entirety so I could make a full psychological thriller short. I'm a big fan of psychological thrillers and I had recently seen the film Shutter Island, which is now one of my favourite films, and that film inspired me a lot for my ideas. I love the concept of there being 2 separate realities, in Shutter Island there is reality and there is the protagonists fantasy world which we are fooled to believe is the real world. I love this idea and I decided to add that to my film.

I needed a reason for there being a separate reality and the idea was thrown about that the film would follow a simple character, just a late teenager enjoying his life when it is sent down hill after he experiences a crash and enters a coma. There it looks like its going back to reality but this is just a fantasy world in this coma and it was just a question of how he would come back.

Primary ideas are in the last post "A2 Production plan" but I have ultimately come up with a rough storyline that goes as follows:

We follow a simple late teenager leaving his flat on his way to work. The starts as simple as that, but there is something about this particular morning that feels out of place. The news in the papers and on TV talks of a crash, there are faint sounds of sirens in the background and the character generally looks troubled. This is the introduction and the rest of the film acts as a crescendo almost. Things get more tense, the character becomes more troubled, more hints to crashes/hospitals as the film goes on and there's an ever sense of growing panic. The audience is not sure what for and nor is he, yet there will be something or a kind of goal he has to reach at the end. This builds and builds up to a climax which I will keep secret for now ;) whether he reaches his goal or not and whats really going on, what is the meaning of all the sirens and links to crashes? Who is he looking for?

I'm still fairly unclear as how I want the ending to happen, but I do want a sense of panic and I hope the audience will worry for the character and whether he reaches his goal, whatever it is.

A2 Production Plan

A2 Production Plan

Evaluation: PowerPoint

Doppler

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.