Weekend January 21st-22nd

Shooting

This weekend we had shot our opening sequence in London. It was good fun but long and tiring to get everything shot in one day.

We started off with meeting at 10am at Morden Station to all travel up together.

The first location that we started with was at the steps outside Waterloo Station. We had started to film here at 11am, this is where we were filming the first shots from our storyboard. When shooting these shots we had to wait for a crowd of people to walk down the steps out of Waterloo so that we could descise our main character within them people. This was very time consuming as the people weren't coming out of the station in consecutive times. When waiting in between the crowds of people walking out we took the opportunity to shoot different angles of the initial shots we had taken.  

We had set up a tripod at this location as were prepared for when people were due to arrive to come out of the station. As our camera screen was faulty and broken, Ella, our camera person, had to manually take certain shots particularly low angle shots. This was a problem that we had throughout the day.

From here we filmed Jack's journey to the next location. Most of these shots were taken only a few yards away from Waterloo Station steps. we shot his journey of him walking across roads, under a bridge and asking people for money, as a Tramp would. 

This then lead us onto our next location which was the stairs leading on to the Millenium Bridge, which was our up coming location. We had set up a tripod at these stairs also as there weren't as many shots we needed to take. By this time 3 hours had past and our actors and crew had frozen, so we decided to take a short break at south bank centre. Whilst we had this break we organised what were doing for the rest of the day.

Mid afternoon and we were at Millennium Bridge. We were at the bridge for quite some time as we were taking lots of different shots and we needed to wait a few times for all the people to pass, as this is one of the busiest areas in London. 

We had then taken the train to Piccadilly Circus where we filmed all of the map shots of Jack. 

From Piccadilly we had moved to Trafalgar Square where most of our shooting got done as this was the location where most of the action was. It was now that we had used Patrick to be our suspicious man. 

Westminster was one of the last places that we were shooting. By this time it was starting to get dark and we were concerned that when editing it wouldn't look as though our character had been walking throughout the day. 

 

Our final location was an underpass by waterloo station. This is where we got to experiment with shots that we took through a mirror reflection on the wall. 

Week 3 January 16th-20th

This week has been extremely productive as many of the problems from the previous week have been resolved and many ideas have changed.


As we had been contemplating for a while weather to use the shed in our opening sequence. 
We all researched into possible locations. The shed was a serious consideration to our story but unfortunately we were unable to find a shed that was suitable. The shed also need to be by an alley so it would have looked as though there was good continuity when we were going to film and edit the footage. Looking at the idea now it does seem to be very unrealistic but at the time we thought that there may possibly been a place that was like the one we had imagined for our opening sequence. As a result of this we decided to also not use the dog in our sequence. As both of these were interlinked with each other in our story. 


From everything that has happened this week, we have progressed our plans quickly as now we are going to film our opening sequence this weekend. We had spent many days, lunches and after schools planning what we needed to do to make the plans for shooting organised and efficient. We had  made sure our storyboard was correct and with their additional shots, done a shooting schedule, call sheet, props list, a remember list and prompted our actors of time, location and attire. I am very excited as we shifted our idea on post it notes into filming this weekend!!

Week 2 January 9th-13th

Group Meeting 2


This week we continued to storyboard our ideas. A lot of discussion has happened this week about the shed. We have all been contemplating about this as it doesn't seem to be very realistic. Although it was my idea to used the shed I understand that it wonit be possible as we have all been looking at different locations for a shed and aren't able to find many. The only shed we did find was a garden shed which was ideal. I found this discussion hard as I liked the idea but if its not possible it can not be done. We had looked at alternatives of the shed. One of which was to have it written in chalk either on a concrete ground or wall. But to do this we would have had to find a place which is isolated because not everyone would be able to see this futuristic map. Another alternative that was suggested was to have the map drawn on the back of the cardboard that the tramp has as his home. I liked this idea slightly more but again the story of a tramp of finding a map on something he has had for a while seemed unidealistic. This was a problem which we didn't know how to resolve. As this map was a major part of our story. 


Someone suggested that the tramp could have a dog. It seemed like a rediculous idea but i really good one. Many tramps have dogs which makes our character seem more authentic and would give our tramp more character. We then thought that this dog could be useful within our story and the tramp would follow his dog who has run from him into a shed which leads on to how the tramp found the map. 


I thought that this map, which we have now classified to be called a 'crime map' as no one knew what to call it, could have pictures on it from the future. As we wanted our story to have some element of the future in it. I understood that this could be difficult to do but not impossible. As we also wanted some of our opening to be located in London we thought that the pictures could be set in London. This sparked up many different thoughts on the types of shot we could get.


In this week one of the days Ella was unable to attend the meeting as she was having an exam. We discussed as a group before that we wouldn't storyboard or making any changes without Ella's contribution in this particular meeting.  In that lesson we thought that we could create our group blog instead. This took Tom, Sam and I a long time to create as we were responsible for the production name. After many strange and interesting attempts to think of names for our group we resulted in using Google to help us. In the end we ended up with Aftershock! Productions, which than.  We then continued to making our blog page and site. 

Week 1 January 4th-6th

Group Meeting 1


Once having been put into our group we all shared our initial ideas from the storyboards we all had done individually. This enabled us a starting point to get ideas from. The first decision we made after this was on the genre of our opening sequence. As a whole we all had the same thought of having a genre that wasn't very common or had been done before by a previous group. This lead onto us listing all the genres we could think of and using the process of elimination to narrow down our options. We ended up with crime and sci-fi (futuristic). From having these two genres we got inspiration from the opening sequence of 'Children of Men' a futuristic film that we were all familiar with.  This concluded us to have sci-fi as our genre. This was a very hard genre to identify for us as we all had thought of different storylines which we didn't know fitted into to any particular genre. 


We all liked to include certain things within our opening sequence so we wrote a few of them down. These included, a voiceover, which Ella suggested as she got the inspiration from Gone Baby Gone. This was an idea that I really liked as I think that voiceovers can be really effective and its a way that we could introduce our main character.  As our genre is going to be sci-fi and we got the inspiration from Children of Men, we started to think of stories which could have some sense of the the future in it. This got us thinking of all the different techniques that we could use the make our opening sequence look realistic. We then realised that this might not be very practical or doable for us. We thought that we could include the future into our opening sequence in a subtler way. Ella thought of an idea from a previous group that we had seen using some sort of map, which was very well done in their film and looked very good. The group really liked this idea and thought it would be an idea we could use. The map could possibly be a way we could create our credits.


Our main idea now is this map, which we imagined to be like one that you could get at the police station for investigations which has string, pins and pictures which looks quite complex. At this point we still don't know what is to be on the map. Moving away from the map we decided to think about our characters. We thought that someone could discover this map somewhere and use the information on it to their advantage. This is now the main bases of our story. Sam suggested that our main character, who we decided to be male, to be a tramp to make the story more interesting. The group loved this idea as it gave our story more depth, interest and certainly enigma. As we now have the main character we all started to think of the different actors that we new would be suited for this role and would be able to be confident enough and fearless to play this role. We all discussed a few people that we all new and noted them down for later. This struck many new ideas, Tom thought of the man being in an alley at the start. I didn't like this idea at first as I thought it didn't seem very interesting but as we started to plan some shots, the idea of an alley was good because our story seemed to be complicated so to have a simplistic location was better. Sam had suggested a sound bridge which is also in Children of Men which was also a good idea for the stories we were thinking of.

As we now had many ideas that we were all in agreement of using in our opening sequence we started to storyboard. We had done our storyboard on pos-it notes as it was easier for all of us to rearrange and adjust any shots and it was clearer to see all the shots laid out on the table.   When we were first writing ideas we thought that one of the locations of our opening sequence could possibly in London.


I think for a first meeting we got a lot of things done even though at the start it took us a while to think of our genre. but i feel vey confident within our group that we will get things done efficiently. Now having had the first meeting I know my group a little more, so I know how well we all co-operate with each other and how we all voice our opinions in different ways.