Our First Filming Day

On Tuesday 1st December, we finally had our very first day of shooting for our horror teaser trailers. As you know, we had to cancel Sunday's video shoot due to the appalling weather... so we were already behind schedule as it was. Therefore, we had to work extra hard on Tuesday to get where we wanted! We got there about 9.30am. Our location was the woods in Spa Hill; where the setting was quite scary and perfect for our film. However... it was absolutely freezing! We were all nearly in tears due to this, and even the camera froze up because of the abysmal weather circumstances! But we couldn't complain; we simply had to get on with it. We stuck to our filming schedule quite well as we did all our shots in order. We took each shot quite a few times as well; so when we edit we can choose the best one. We also included quite a few cutaways as well, in case we need to add to some shots or make them look less awkward. Me being the director, had to constantly keep shouting 'Action!'... with my director's board. Our first location was fine to shoot at, but when we got deeper in to the woods, we incurred some problems. Firstly, it was a chore bringing all the equipment up the steep hill when we got further into the woods. Secondly, there were many stinging nettles which were getting in the way. Lastly, the deeper we went into the woods... the colder and colder it got! We did work well as a team though, and got the job done swiftly and quickly. We shot many takes of our shots to ensure we had enough and could have a variety to choose from. When we got deeper into the woods, we also discovered many odd bits of furniture. These were actually really scary... there was an old broken leather chair tilted to it's side, a bed with no mattress with the springs forced out, rope tied on to the trees, writing on the trees, an old broken radio, and many other scary objects. It actually added to the effect that we were trying to create, so we took shots of it on the video camera as well as the still camera! We also took many photos on our shoot, as proof that we visited the woods... these will soon be on my blog also! When we went back to college after all that filming, we went to view what we had filmed so far. It was really terrible news when we found out the camera had frozen up many times, and the settings had messed up due to the freezing cold weather. This gave a pixelated effect on the screen; which looked really unprofessional. We were so afraid we had to film the whole shoot all over again... it was a horrific moment!! However, we got Mr Varghese (our media class's technology teacher... adobe, video cameras, etc) to have a look at it for us. Even he was a bit apprehensive as to what had happened and was convinced we had to re-shoot. But in the end, he finally managed to fix it with his magical hands!! We were so happy we couldn't even explain it! We watched back our filming and were very proud of ourselves. Although it's not finished, I think us four (Me, Kinnerey, Sarah and Nahed) worked extremely well as a team and just got on with it!! We achieved a lot and I can't wait to film again on Sunday!!