Wrapped!

Our shooting weekend is over and I am very pleased with the results! I think we went into this film a lot more prepared than the last one and it showed. On Friday afternoon we did our stills on campus, Saturday morning did our stills in Victoria Park and did rehearsals with the cast and Sunday shot the film at the police station. Both Friday and Saturday went extremely smoothly and whilst there were some problems on the Sunday, they all worked out in the end.

Sunday's shooting was by far the best day of filming I have worked on (excluding running work!) as we were using a good camera (Ciaran's Canon 7D), we had a good location, good actors and good equipment (tracking and lighting) and costumes (courtesy of Duncan whose father and brother are policemen). The fact that we were shooting inside also meant that we didn't have any adverse weather conditions to deal with. As with any day of filming, however, we did have some slight problems. The main (and only real) problem was due to us filming in such high quality. We were recording onto Compact Flash cards and had a system whereby we used two cards, so that we could transfer the footage to one of our MacBooks and then clear it when the next one was full. However, the problem occurred when the MacBooks were too old to handle the footage that we had shot, meaning that we soon reached a point where we no longer had any space on our Compact Flash cards and could not contiue shooting. This led to me and Ciaran wondering in and out of camera and electronics shops in Bristol trying to find some new cards so that we could continue, with the results consistently being that they were too small or cost £200. Yet another hour was then wasted trying to find a Jessops, which everybody we asked seemed to know the location of (including the GPS on our iPhones), but we always found ourselves at the same petrol station! Eventually we returned accepting defeat and ended up having to call one of Josh's friends to pick up Ciaran's newer MacBook Pro from our house in Bath and drop it off.

With two and a half hours successfully wasted, we were worried that we would not be able to finish shooting, as we were meant to be vacating the premises by 6pm. Luckily for us, however, the people who ran the arts centre were as relaxed as you would expect an artist to be and said we could stay there as long as we needed, as long as we closed the door behind us! In the end, this meant that we only had to sacrifice a couple of shots from our shotlist, none of which were crucial anyway. Here are a couple of sneak preview pictures from our weekend.

Pre-Production

The last couple of weeks have been occupied by pre-production work on The Interview, this has mostly consisted of two things, casting & locations. After lots of false starts and dead ends we finally have both!

Casting

Initially our main character (Luke Phillips) was going to be played by a friend of me and Myles, Bradley Ojugo, who studied acting at BRIT school. However, he ended up pulling out meaning we were left back at square one with no cast! Shortly after this spot of bad luck we were blessed with acquiring all three of our lead actors within the space of a week. Myles had got in touch with the head of Performing Arts, Chris Jury, who put us in contact with Guy Smallwood. Myles also got in contact with a friend of his, Duncan Roe, with whom he had worked on a film last year. Our third lead came through Elspeth, who had got into contact with the Theatre Royal in Bath who put us in contact with Ed Browning. We had our three leads.

Luckily all three of our actors were in their mid-to-late twenties, so they didn't look too typical of those you normally see in student productions. Whilst it would have been nicer to perhaps get some actors pushing 30 or even 40, we were more than happy with our cast.

Locations

Our locations scouting was holding our finalised script in the lurch, whilst we had already finished the script and set it to the police station. If we were not able to get a suitable location then we were going have to change it to an office scenario. We had some initial links through the Bath film office to use Bath Police Station and a restaurant in town, which used to be a police station. Unfortunately both of these were dead ends and we were unable to get permission to film in either. With things not looking good for us being able to use our script, Elspeth found another ex-police station in Bristol (Bridewell Art Centre) and booked us an appointment to be shown round. We went there without the highest expectations based on our previous efforts, but were pleasantly surprised when we got there!

Not only was the location perfect for what we wanted, having all of our locations (corridor, cell, interview room), but they had had experience with film crews using it, with Being Human having been filmed there a few weeks ago and they let us use it free of charge as we were students. Here are some pictures of the location:

However, this was not our only location we needed. We also had to find an office and a supermarket to take stills for our flashback sequences. As with the police station, we were initially turned down for both locations. For the supermarket we tried Sainsburys and two branches of Co-Op, none of which wanted to be associated with the issue of schizophrenia or criminal activities. The offices were also hard to gain permission for, this time as we wanted to shoot on a weekend, and it was very hard to negotiate times when we would be able to use them. Although this is understandable, as they would not have been getting anything out of it! In the end we reluctantly settled on locations on campus, which we had been trying to avoid. For the supermarket we used the SU shop and for the office we used an office in the library. Thankfully, however, both of these locations turned out really well, as we were able to shoot them from such angles that it was not obvious as to where they were taken.