Account of Shoot Day - Narrative Element

For the narrative element of our video, we travelled by mini-bus to Guildford and arrived at Farnham Road Car Park at about 5pm. Fergus and Connor drove in convoy in their own cars which we planned to use for the video shoot. We drove up to floor 9, where there was a cleared area of the car park which was a suitable place for filming in.

To begin, we gave the cast a short brief, explaining to them what they had to do. We then began filming the shots in sequence of their occurrence, first starting with the shot of Pete opening the boot of the car and falling to the ground. We filmed this from a few different angles, with a variety of wide and mid shots. We filmed this in slow motion, which involved changing the settings on the camera. The slow motion function allowed us to shoot only 6 seconds worth of film so we had to ensure that the action was captured within the 6 seconds. It would then buffer and convert into slow motion. The slow motion effect had so much more of an impact, and captured that dramatic feeling that we had intended.

In one of the shots where Pete’s head hits the ground, we had hoped to have a bit of blood coming out of his ear, but this proved to be much more difficult than we had first anticipated. We tried to pour the fake blood into the cave of his ear and asked him to slighting turn his head as it hit the floor to allow the blood to drip out. After a few times of trying, we established that it wouldn’t look very effective, so we decided to scrap that idea. This however meant that we had to clean up any trace of the blood because it couldn’t appear in any of our other shots.

After we had captured all the footage between Connor and Pete, we started to use our extras for their reaction shots. We gave each of our extras a different scenario in which they should react to the body on the floor. These reactions shots were very realistic, and I think we managed to capture the desperation and helplessness that they might have felt if they were to have been in that situation.

We decided to use a Go Pro Cam, which we attached to the roof of one of the cars where we also put a blue flashing light. This was meant to suggest the presence of an ambulance as it would have been too difficult to get a real ambulance. I’m not sure how successful this shot was as we were unable to see it, but hopefully we will be able to incorporate it into our video somehow.  

Overall, I think the narrative element was shot fairly successfully, although it was very late and so we were all very tired which could have perhaps affected our performance during the shooting. Despite this, we didn’t come across any real issues and I think we managed to capture the intensity and seriousness of being in that kind of situation.