Location Shooting

This morning i got up at 8 am and went out to film the locations that will be the backgrounds in my film.

I planned to shoot them in the correct order, so that the lighting conditions would be correct in the timing. 

Park Bench

First i headed to the park to shoot a park bench background. There were 2 to choose from, one with a road behind which was quite interesting, but i thought that it might take the attention away from the characters. Also this bench wasn't straight and so when i had straightened it in the viewfinder, the houses were slanted.

Therefore i chose another bench, which just had trees behind. Nice simple trees. I paced out 18 feet (as this is the distance that the seat in the green studio was away from the camera). Then i filmed about 3 minute chunks of footage about 3 times just to be sure.

I decided to start the scene with a pan down from the white sky. I did this because the bench scene is the opening scene of the film, so i thought it would give the film a bit of movement before the motionless backgrounds kicked in.  

I also set the exposure to manual, so that the light didn't change at all on the pan down went i came to add the characters in. Another reason was to make the sky bright white, which would make the opening of the film more aesthetically pleasing.

Cash Point

Next i scurried over to my local Co-op to film the cashpoint background. (There is a scene in the film where the characters are queuing at a  cash point.) 

Again i shot 3 minutes of footage a couple of times at 18 feet. It was quite busy and people kept on walking through the shot which meant that i had to keep the camera rolling until i had 3 minutes of non stop cash point. 

(Also i switched the camera off when people tried to get money out as i didn't want to look too shifty!)

Bus Stop

Finally i shot the Bus Stop background, which was just opposite the cash point. I had chosen to film a different stop than the first one is filmed in my tests, because the first bus stop was next to a bank which i had to film from. This meant that the camera was too high. Also there wasn't much walking space as the path was narrow.

The Bus Stop took the longest to film, with people coming and going off and on buses. 

Was pretty frustrating, but i got my 3 mins footage in the end. Woo!