25/11/09 Production Diary (Part 4 Exterior Woods Scene)

With our project relying on daylight for shooting ,time was minimal. We had to shoot around the weather conditions and lighting given and thankfully the 25th of November was a perfect day for filming. We had to re-shoot footage for Chapter 1: Journey, as on the first session of filming we did not gather all the resources necessary to construct this scene successfully.



The footage required consisted of several pans, handheld footage and tilts for the Character’s journey across the field, which would continue through into Chapter 2: Disposal. The shots would show the character’s progression in his task/quest that he has undertaken through no choice of his own.

The trees shown in the picture above metaphorically symbolise a gateway, this could be related to poetical conceit, as the trees become the finish line for the first part of the characters Journey; hence the name of the first chapter.
We wanted to get various long shots/pans and then in post production, chop them up into sections, transforming them into jump cut shots, to create give the audience an insight into the characters fragmented mind.
We then had the idea, of filming a second pan shot and dividing it up in post production , putting the clips in the wrong order, to show the characters struggle and how he is beginning to hallucinate due to the his emotional trauma.

Due to weather conditions as it being winter the temperature and the harshness of the cold made it difficult for Peter McLaughlin acting in our production as he forgot about the main continuity issues that were present in our short film. As we proceed from shot to shot during the filming Peter forgetting about continuity kept putting his jumper on due to it being so cold. This resulted in us filming a certain shots where Peter was wearing his jumper. Oliver Fitch was the first to notice this huge error so we had to reshoot all the footage with this continuity issue present and he had to remind Peter between shots to remove it otherwise the same mistake would be repeated.

After acquiring the footage needed to complete Chapter 1: Journey, we back tracked to the forest location, which was the start of this chapter. As we needed to show the character proceeding through the forest to the field.

We then began to shoot footage for the forest/ dream sequence scene of our film. However due to the time restrictions on our film we realised after obtaining the footage that the camera work used for the dream sequence would not fit within our timescale even after post production. The camera work itself was also not to the standard of which we were hoping, so another shooting day for the forest was needed.

By Oliver Fitch & Peter McLaughlin