Friday 11th January

We re-shoot our final shot today as our first one was too fast, very bumpy, the 'x' was awful and the last photo wasnt clear enough that it was a new girl (as we used the one as she is walking down the road). So on wednesday night Alix took some more pictures of our final girl from above through a window (as if she is just a passer by) and then printed them off the next day.

Alix

Final Shot

We are shooting our last shot tomorrow (which is leaving a little late we know)
These are the photos of the new girl he is stalking:

We think this one is a little too close, not in a disturbing way, just in an unbelievable way

I really like this one because of the bush in the foreground it shows him hiding and i think it's a good distance

This one is also good as it's just simple, we will probably definitely use this one.

The shot will show one photo already up and he will put a new one up as well, but we haven't decided which ones yet

Alix

Pan Shot

Plan

• Pan starts half way across one photo (well this is where we will cut it for the start of the shot)
• Goes across 3/4 other photos which are all crossed out with red marker
• Comes to photo of Alix, crosses it out top left to bottom right, then top right to bottom left.
• The camera carries on panning to see just a photo of a girl walking a long the road/waiting for a bus.
• Then he puts a new photo up of this girl - doing something normal again, and he strokes the photo

Friday 14th December

Our definitely final shoot is tomorrow, we are meeting at 9am and plan to finish by 12. We are going to re shoot the following shots of Nick because of his new hair cut:

• The first shot of him walking, he will now walk almost side to side in the frame to make it more obvious (that she is drugged)
• The aerial (ish) shot of her running in shot and then him running in shot, in our first take they run top right to bottom left, but it has to be bottom right to top left so that it makes sense (as she runs that way into the forest).
• We need a shot from her POV (just after she has looked round) of him behind her striding towards the camera - reverse track as if she is running obviously
• More low level tracking shots of his feet (and her feet)
• The entire capture scene, as in editing the shots don't fit together well due to different bodily positions.

We also need to shoot some other shots which are missing and some new ones:

• More POV shots - we need more anchorage that she is drugged
• We need to reshoot her feet running past the camera and then his as well (it wasn;t framed very well and Alix's feet need to stumble)
• A few more CU reverse tracks of Alix to show more emotion
• We also need a shot of her looking round (then cut to her POV)
• We are also maybe going to do our river shot AGAIN as it is still a little wobbly.
• We also need to get some panting/frantic sounds of Alix

Alix

Shooting Weekend

On Saturday morning we went to Grovelands to test shoot our new idea without Nick, and to try and do some final shots which Alix was in and Nick wasn't. However, after about 30 minutes it started to rain, and continued to get heavier until it was impossible to shoot and Alix was extremely cold (particularly as she was on the floor a lot). So we decided to go back to Alix's house as it was round the corner and do some more planning and storyboarding.

Then on sunday we met at 9am and started to shoot, after about 2 hours it started to completely pour but instead of giving up again we decided to wait under a shelter until it cleared up - which it did after about half an hour. There were showers for the rest of the day but we were still able to shoot through out. We didn't get it finished but we did get some good shots, however we are having great difficulty with one reaction shot of her looking around to see him, because Alix's acting skills aren't great - we feel the only solution is to keep trying because it's such a crucial shot we can't cut it.

This tuesday we have a half day and the only lessons we have in the morning is double media studies and double private study so we are planning to shoot then. However Nick is unavailable so we will have to shoot for a few hours on Sunday morning to complete the shots with him in.

Alix

Thursday 6th December

We decided to stick to our orginal(ish) idea, we are still going to have the opening as the chase with Lara, but we will try to cut this down to 1min 20 secs. The last 40 or so seconds will be the slow fade to black, fade in and then out of the films title, then fade into the pan of the different girls omn the walls, he will then cross out in red laras face and will add a new photo of a new girl. In this meeting we also decided on the schedule for the weekend (i.e. different scenarios depening on weather) which is shown below. We are also planning to take our poloroid photos on tuesday lunch time.

Alix

Weather

A large problem of ours at the moment is the weather, these are the 2 local weather reports for Southgate/Palmers Green for this coming weekend.



Obviously the best day is Sunday as it has light showers and some patchy sunshine, however, if we leave it till Sunday and it does rain in the morning we would have to shoot our whole thing again so that all of our footage is in the rain - but we can't do this all in one day.
So instead we are going plan to shoot the second half of our footage on Saturday and if it rains then we will shoot our first half again instead. This is incase it rains on sunday - we will shoot the second half on sunday, and if it rains we use the first half in the rain, and if it doesn't then we use the first half which is shot in sunshine from the previous weekend.

- Does this make sense? It seems a little rambley

Alix

Shooting weekend

Shooting weekend: December 1st-2nd

December 1st we carried out our main shooting session, where we made successful attempts at our finl shots. Using a quality control check after all shots we believe most of the shots taken are at a high standard and those which are not will be reshot next weekend. As all of us in the group were out to achieve the highest standards of camera work, shooting was much longer than anticipated. This factor, accompanied with the freezing weather conditions meant that shooting was postponed as our actress was so freezing and began to feel poorly. It would have been ridiculous to make her stay throughout these conditions, and more than this the quality of acting would/was beginnning to deteriorate. Although not every shot was completed we feel as a group that shots taken were infact of a good quality (sometimes we took 10 takes just to get the right camera work and acting!). From this we as a group feel that next week we must firstly film the remaining shots in this outdoor location even if the weather conditions are inappropriate, and secondly to reshoot the least successful shots taken this weekend.

On 2nd december, we as a group are not able to shoot anymore of the opening sequence. This is because it is forecast to rain all day (which it did!), and our actress desperately needed to leave the shoot at 9.45am. This would have meant that from sunrise we would have had roughly an an hour and a half, in which to shoot in undesired conditions.

Problems from this shooting weekend were as follows:

• the weather conditions (freezing and then a full day of rain)


• time taken between shots was too long that not all shots were completed


• the actress could not perform a 'fall' in the way the group all desired


• the sun shone brightly and then was clouded over (a very dark sky)


• due to the time taken to quality control all shots, it meant the actor (villain) was not needed til much later in the day- although he seemed to enjoy the time away from studying and liked to give his opinion as a viewer.


• there were many distractions and many people in some shots as the park was full of dog walkers, runners, walkers, families, children on bikes etc. This meant the shooting was delayed further.

Here is an example of some of the shot logging we did to make it easier for us to know which shots to upload to the comptuer.

Matt, Liam

Thursday 29th November

During our meeting today after school we altered our shot list, there are still some gaps but we feel that it would be better to mark out the chase on a path in the woods and then just shoot her running and stumbling from many different angles over and over to fill in the gaps between our main events.

Here is the new shot list:

Shot 1
Slow Pan of forest (1+2+3 panoramic – 360)

Shot 2
Slow pan (diff angle)

Shot 3
Slow pan (another angle)

Shot 4
Blurry POV (moving) of girl (woods)

Shot 5
Another blurry POV (looks from up to down)

Shot 6
Further blurry POV

Shot 7
Establishing shot , she is stumbling ELS

Shot 8
MLS/LS reverse track of her stumbling

Shot 9
Pan R-L, she runs in and out of shot

Shot 10
POV of her running, stumbling

Shot 11
Track of her, then she falls over

Shot 12
LS see her scrambling up

Shot 13
MLS/LS Track of her running, moves to side track, tree in shot

Shot 14
POV from girl, just running

Shot 15
LS-MS runs past camera, she almost stumbles into it

Shot 16
LS / MLS side of her from behind trees (framed by trees)

Shot 17
POV of her running / stumbling (only stumbles, hits knee for example)

Shot 18
Reaction shot – front on MS of girl regaining balance

The following are general shots which we will include when we feel they are appropriate
General1
Tracking her through the trees, LS
2
Reverse track through trees LS
3
Side track or track of his feet
4
Side track or track of her feet
5
High angle from tree, Girl runs in then out of frame, then male runs in then out of frame
He appears
Girl stumbles out of view, male is left in the frame camera moves towards him – to MS

Track of her running and stumbling, she starts to slightly look behind

CU her looking round very scared

POV from her of him striding towards

POV of male of her falling backwards (root etc) (2 cams)

Side track trees in frame of Lara running
He disappears
Reverse track she leans on a tree MS/LS

Reverse to other side of tree (stationary), she turns around a little

POV from her looking for male, he’s not there, shaky whip pans

OTS MS/LS track her walking backwards, stumbling, clearly in shock,
Then she carries on running


He reappears
She is looking to the left, he hand comes out from the right (round a tree). Track MLS

MCU he whispers in her ear ‘‘I knew you’d look lovely in this dress’

CU/BCU chloroform rag over mouth, her eyes flutter shut

Shot of her feet being dragged (side track) then dragged out of shot
Shed
Pan L-R Polaroids, comes to Lara’s he crosses out in red, puts up new photo

Obviously there are some gaps, but as ours is made up of so many short takes we really want to be there and we know we will get inspired while there like we did on the test shoot

Matt, Angelie, Liam, Alix

Tuesday 27th November

We watched our footage from our test shoot today, after doing a quick test edit we were quite happy with the results but have still decided on a lot of changes:

• Lara needs to look completely hysterical because during our test shoot it wasn't believable that she had been/is about to be raped, so we decided to make sure that; she runs faster, is a lot more clumsy and stumbley (making it obvious she has been drugged), she has to look a lot more scared, and we are also going to mess up her hair, smudge her nmake-up, and put mud on her legs/arms and dress.
• Nick also needs to be further away from her otherwise it is so unbelievable that he hasn't caught her already, and he also needs to take bigger more confident strides.
• Our framing also needs to be tighter in order to really focus the audience's attention on Lara's emotion.
• We also need to start recording before we say action, and leave it runnign for a little afterwards and have our actors run in and out of the frame to give ourselves more choice when editing
• During the shoot we didn't concentrate on shot logging and using the whiteboard, so this weekend when shooting one person will do the whiteboard, one will shot log, one will film, and the other will direct the actors. And obviously we will switch roles all the time to give everyone a fair chance.
• Our POVs also need more variance - e.g. looking up and down, and we are also not going to unfocus the camera on shoot but afterwards when editing so that we can fully control it.
• We also realised that we don't have enough shots, so we are going to take a lot more of her just running and stumbling to give ourselves more choice in the edit room - almost like filler shots, we also want more shots of her falling over.
• We realise a big problem of ours is continuity - i.e. the background matching up, so next time we are going to carefully choose a path through the forest. Then we will do POV shots all the way along the path, to again give us more choice when editing.
• Lara also got increidbly cold and unconfrotable - particularly between shots when she couldn't put her shoes back on, so this weekend we are going to bring an old towel (or some form of material) for her to stand on, and change on, and sit down if she wishes.
• Our main problem was our initial shotlist was also not very helpful so our main priority before this weekend is to create a perfect one which we can just follow and therefore avoid time wasting. We are going to talk through every single shot and therefore get any disagreements out of the way before hand.

Alix

Final Costume

Since our last post about costumes, we managed to find the perfect white dress for our victim. We felt that this dress was much better than the blue one, since it was a proper signifier of innocence and purity.

Here's a picture of our actress wearing the dress:


And this is a picture of our actor in his costume:

~ Angelie

Initial Shot List

This is our first shot list for our test shoot

Shot 1
Slow Pan of forest (1+2+3 panoramic – 360)
4/5 secs Fade to

Shot 2
Slow pan (diff angle)
3 /4 secs Fade to

Shot 3
Slow pan (another angle)
4/5 secs Fade to

Shot 4
Girl climbing over fence
2 secs

Shot 5
Girl running into woods
3 secs

Shot 6
Blurry POV (moving) of girl (woods)
1/2 secs fade to

Shot 7
Another blurry POV (looks from up to down)
½ secs fade to

Shot 8
Further blurry POV
½ secs fade to

Shot 9
High angle (from tree) Establishing shot , she is stumbling

Shot 10
MLS/LS reverse track of her stumbling
½ secs

Shot 11
POV of her running, stumbling
2 secs Fade to

Shot 12
POV she falls, see hands hit the ground
2 secs

Shot 13
LS see her scrambling up
2 secs

Shot 14
Side Track MLS/LS of her running – runs out of frame?
2/3 secs

Shot 15
Low angle, about to jump/stumble over log
1/2 secs cut to

Shot 16
Camera on floor, shot of bare feet.
1/2 secs

Shot 17
POV, blurring, focusing in and out
2 secs

Shot 18
Reverse or stationary, girl stumbles out of view, male is left in the frame
3 secs

Shot 18
(same one) either we are stationary or forward track he is striding
2 secs

Shot 19
Track of her running and stumbling, she starts to slightly look behind
2 secs

Shot 20
CU her looking round very scared
1.5 secs

Shot 21
POV from her of him striding towards
1/2 secs

Shot 22
POV of male of her falling backwards (root etc)
2 secs

Shot 23
Side track trees in frame of Lara running
2 secs

Shot 24
High angle from tree, Girl runs in then out of frame, then male runs in then out of frame

Shot 25
Reverse track she stops behind a tree panting MCU to CU
3 secs

Shot 26
Reverse to other side of tree (stationary), half tree she peeks around
1/2 secs

Shot 27
POV from her looking for male, he’s not there, shaky whip pans
3/4 secs

Shot 28
LS girl screams
3 secs


These next shots are later on, but we haven't quite figured out the details in between and we want to test shoot them.

He reappears - scenario 1
LS track She is running through the trees, then he is behind one, she doesn’t notice and he grabs her.

CU, he whispers in her ear as he chloroforms her ‘I knew you’d look lovely in this dress’

He reappears - scenario 2
She is looking to the left, as his hand comes out from the right (round a tree). Track MLS


MCU he whispers in her ear ‘‘I knew you’d look lovely in this dress’


CU/BCU chloroform rag over mouth, her eyes flutter shut

He reappears - scenario 3
Whip pan left, she sees figure

Whip pan right, she sees another figure

Whip pan from right to centre he’s right there

Matt, Angelie, Alix, Liam

Test Shoot

For our test shoot we are meeting at 6:15am at Alix's house and going to the park before the actors get there so we can set up, we are then meeting Nick and Lara at 7am. We are going to shoot till latest 10/11am.

Props to Take

Matt

• Hot Ribena, Rope, Extension Lead, Camera 1, 'Chloroform' rag
  

Alix

• Dress, Food, Tripods, Bag, Sound Kit, Digicam, Black Scarf, Make-up

Angelie

• Extension Lead, Digicam, White board, Marker Pen, Group Folder etc, Lighting Kit

Liam

• Camera 4, Camera Booklet, Food, Umbrella(s)

Alix

Prop List

On Screen

• White floaty or silky dress
• Black Trenchcoat
• Black scarf/trousers/shoes
• Make-up

On Set

• Umbrellas
• Digital Camera
• Warm things for Lara - Hot Ribena/Coat/Blanket
• Wheel barrow
• Cling Film (vaseline)

All