Shooting Schedule

Making a shooting schedule will help me organise my time and determine what shots to do and when. I realise that seeing as it is winter there will be a limited amount of time to do my exterior shots because of the lack of light, therefore I will be filming my exterior shots first. Also, when planning what days I will be shooting on I have encountered a few problems. As the weeks we have to film on are the 2 weeks year 11, 12 and 13 have exams it is proving difficult to find days 2 of my actors can film on as they are both still in school. I have overcome this by eventually finding 2 days they can both film on, however my shots wont be filmed in the same sequence as they will be shown in the film. I do not think this will be too much of a problem though as I can cut them all together in the editing stage. Only giving myself 2 days to film most of my interior shots (as the 2 main actors are the ones that are finding it hard to find time to shoot) will be a challenge, but if there are problems in filming and we do not film everything we need to I have set aside an extra day for emergency filming.

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Wednesday 20th January:

I had planned to start filming on Tuesday 19th January, only filming exterior shots of the house and the scene where the intruder walks up to the garage. I completed this successfully but found that these scenes may need to be refilmed at a later date as I had left some things in shot that were not originally meant to be there. I also originally planned on filming on Wednesday 20th January and possibly Friday 22nd January if we hadn't got everything filmed on the Wednesday/need to refilm anything, using all of my actors. However, this did not happen because one of my female actors became ill in the morning before shooting and was unable to film. Seeing as the scenes I wanted to shoot all involved both of my female actors, I had to cancel the day of filming. I then wrote up my shooting schedule and was told that both of my actors would be able to film on Friday 22nd January and possibly Sunday 24th January if needed.

My Shooting Schedule - (Click to enlarge)

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Friday 22nd January:

Two of my actors let me down the day before filming, leaving me with no one else available to film at such short notice. This led to me having to arrange new actors and reschedule my filming days with a very short amount of time left to film. Eventually, after a lot of searching I found two new actors who were available to film at such short notice, Saman Aftab and Jo Edmonds. We have now rescheduled and plan to film on Sunday 24th January. If all goes according to plan I should hopefully be able to film everything on Sunday, perhaps with only a few short scenes that I can do on Monday night.


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Wednesday 27th January:


On Sunday morning one of my actors let me down again, making me unable to film for a 3rd time. I had to get another actor at the very last minute to film on Monday evening. I managed to get all of my filming done, however as my actors were only able to come at the last minute they had no time to prepare or learn their lines. I gave them a copy of the script, told them the plot and showed them the storyboard when they got back to the house but had to film almost immediately because we needed to use the natural light. Filming over all was successful but I did encounter a few problems.



Problems I encountered and overcame whilst filming:

Lighting - In the scenes in the study I'd planned on using natural light, however as we filmed the scene quite late it was already dark outside so to overcome this I had to use a lamp that can not be seen in the background as a light source. I also encountered a lighting problem with the scenes in the dining room where we see the intruder at the patio door and when we see the intruder walk up to the patio door in the garden. Again, it was dark outside and as the intruder is dressed in black it is difficult to see him. However, I found that this made the scene look more mysterious and subtle instead of it being obvious that you can see the intruder. I tried using the light above the patio door to add more light but then it looked really obvious that the intruder was there and the girls would have seen him if the light was on, therefore I believe this set back actually made the scene more successful than I had originally planned.

Shots/Angles - When I planned and drew my storyboard I drew some of my shots as long shots. Unfortunately, through lack of space I decided these shots would be better off as medium/medium long shots when actually filming. This was successful as we are able to see more of the actors’ reactions and as the shot is closer up we are able to hear the actors' dialogue more clearly. Also, the shot where we see the intruder outside the patio door was compromised further as the room is not as wide as I thought it was so I had to film that scene on the stairs and changed the shot from a long shot to a high angle shot. I think this is better because the high angle shot shows the vulnerability of the girls and I think this is a more inventive shot than just using a standard long shot and gives my film more shot variety.