During the First Shoot.

During the  first shoot i had enlisted my participant Harry, i wanted to screen test him and see how well he did on camera, he had the right look for the kind of film i wanted to create but i didnt know if when i asked him to carry out a task he would look too unnatural, as it turns out he did look quite awkward, for the sake of the film i decided to make more time for filming and cleared my schedule to allow for more time to capture his natural reactions to things on film. During the first shoot i had various technical problems, because i was using a canon d600 instead of a 60d and i only had the stock lens as the university stores werent open over easter which i didn't realise, i found it quite difficult to film in low light situations without a grainy effect, and because of the small screen on the camera it was really hard to see the quality of the shot until i got home, i also wanted to do a stop motion of the yard before i left but i was borrowing a friends photography tripod which wasn't as sturdy as the film ones there was too much shake and i didnt feel confident leaving the camera alone in fear of it falling over. This was a shame but never the less some of the footage i captured on the day was pretty good, i had captured some really interesting lens flares, and some good footage of harry doing some work on a car.

I used this day mostly to scout locations for my second day of filming, there were a few places in the yard that i thought were quite visually interesting, the warehouse with all the tools and the fact that there were a few 'yard dogs' running around made the whole thing have a lot more character. I took a walk around the buisness park and found that there was a huge roud that ran around the entire thing, with interesting buildings along the side, it also had various fields behind with lots of dumped material in, when i got home i wrote a list of all the key features i wanted to use. This is when i got the idea for the moving shots from the car of Harry running. I had seen 400 blows before and this had inspired me to do a similar shot, the running scene for me in that film conotes a kid running to and from his past and future, he is trying in the most basic way possible to move forward, he just loses it and begins to move. There is something striking about seeing a child run and i wanted to capture this on film for myself.

Here is a test shot i took that ended up in the final film, it needed some color correction but it looked very nice.

This was a large sticker that was in a window, it gave me the idea for the working title of my film, although i didnt use this shot i thought that the words had a deeper meaning in the context of my film.

 

It was during this shoot that i realised that Harry was a smoker, i felt bad that i filmed him smoking but in reality he is almost 16 and able to make his own decisions, edit (i put this in the final film as i thought it gave the right effect, it was shocking in the right way).

 

 

Overall i felt like this shoot was a success in terms of planning, but i think if i could have done more filming and started earlier i could have caught a much wider range of footage.