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.