Filming Rushes So Far..... - Alex Lloyd

Our first intentions to film were during the half term, we unfortunately couldn't film as much as we would have liked to due to each member of our group never being free together and our actor having a very busy schedule. We also had problems with the weather, in order to keep continuity throughout our short film we would need to film on days with the same weather forecast. The weather we chose was cloudy skies, this is because the weather was said to be cloudy for the week after half term but also it can connote quite a sad, depressed feeling throughout our social realist film.

The week beginning 22nd February we organized for Caroline, Abi and I to go to our location to shoot our first few shots. We did this on the tuesday and managed to film a lot of establishing shots of the house and the surroundings as well as a few interior shots, these included Milo waking up and some nice shots of the props around his house. As director I found that the framing of each shot was very important, this is something that perhaps last year I didn't really work on as much so improving it for our short film was crucial. We managed to use the framing in a way that connotes the house as isolated and alone, much like the feelings of Milo our character. Abi and Caroline worked with the lighting making it seem as much realistic as possible creating continuity between shots, throughout most of our film we will be having natural lighting as we feel this will be best for our genre but throughout our interior shots, due to the time of day we shot them, we needed lighting to be controlled. Whilst they worked on lighting, as director I made sure the props were set out correctly as well as the filming.

The camera we used for these shots was the small Sony HD camera giving us a wide screen format as well as a better picture quality with our rushes. It enabled us to manually control the focus which became very effective with our establishing shots. We were easily able to blur something out in the background with it in focus on something nearby. Overall throughout the week we managed to film on tuesday and wednesday. We filmed enough footage to build our first minute of the film.