britasthrilleralex: November 2010

We had planned to shoot our Thriller opening on the 10th, 11th and 12th of Novembe, however, there was a student protest in Central London, where our story takes place. We thought it sensible to avoid any difficulties including transport cancellations, and large amounts of people, so we decided not to shoot on the Wednesday.

Overall, our shoot was successful. We did not encounter any problems in Central London and were very aware of the public in regards to our equipment and their privacy. We shot in London on the Thursday morning, so had a bit of a time limit as we had to be back for our lessons, therefore we did not complete all of our filming. However, we did plan days on which to re-shoot, so this was not a problem.

We shot in my dads offices, The Department of Education, on Friday. We really wanted to get permission to use the building as we wanted to create an authentic office/organisation environment, so we were very grateful for this accomodation. When filming we were very concious of the fact it was a work environment so kept quiet and tried as hard as we could to stick to our shot list. The shoot was successful, apart from a small error in preparation regarding the elevators. We wanted to show our character walking into a lift, being in there, and walking out, but we had not realised how many lifts there were that respond to just one button. We had to press the button the quickly rush to the one that was coming. We did eventually manage to shoot it. We were also on somewhat of a time limit as we could not let it get dark, for continuity purposes. We filmed from roughly two thirty, and it starts getting dark at around 4.30, so we didnt have a huge amount of time.

When we came to the edit, we were told that all of our footage was unusable, due to over exposure (despite the fact the camera was on 'auto' for the duration of the shoot) and we could not load our footage onto the computer as the tape lagged and jumped. This was an unfortunate case of bad luck with equipment. We will have to reshoot the entire thing. This would have been a huge problem for us as the use of my dad's offices was pretty exclusive, however, he confirmed that we will be able to use it again.

I hope the reshoot will be beneficial, as we can perfect things we werent one-hundred percent happy with, and we may be more efficient in regards to shooting. We plan to film the majority of the central London content on Friday 19th, and the rest the following friday, including the stuff at my dads office.