Production - Trailer Rough Cut

North Chamber Rough Cut from Sam Duxbury on Vimeo.

This is the rough cut for our trailer, which will differ from our final trailer as it does not yet include a voiceover monologue, and we are yet to shoot some scenes which will be included in our final production. Of the footage we already have, we are predominantly happy with how it looks in this rough form, however we would like to make some of the shots less sustained to be more in keeping with trailer conventions.

Production - Shoot Diary 5th December 2014

Call Sheet - 5.12.14

Prior to this shoot, we arranged for three of our actors to arrive at the same time, so we could film the scene with only them in before our fourth actor got to the location. Two of our actors (Robert Mason and Loan Evans) attend our school which is our location, and their costumes were basically their school uniforms with some additions, so they were quickly ready to film. After Kaitlyn Knight had changed into her costume and had her make up done, we were able to start filming the first scene on the call sheet.

This scene could have been very problematic, as it involved one of our characters ripping a page from our main character's notebook, meaning that we only had the chance to film one take of this scene, as the page would have to be ripped from the book. However, we got around this problem by ripping the book before we filmed the scene, and having Loan, who was supposed to rip the book, hold the ripped page in place and pull it out, meaning we could film multiple takes of this scene. Another problem was that the location for this scene was outside, and was therefore very cold due to the time of year, so we had to film quickly for the comfort of our actors.

Once our fourth actor arrived and had changed into her costume, we could film the rest of the scenes on the call sheet. The next two scenes posed a challenge, as some books needed to be knocked out of our main character's hands and then be shown in close up landing on the floor in the next shot, meaning continuity was an issue; we had to film many takes of the books landing on the floor and, off camera, Kaitlyn had to throw the books into shot. Another challenge was the fact our main character had to be "pushed" by the others onto the floor, which was an obvious health and safety risk. No one was hurt, as our actors only pretended to push her and she pretended to fall.

The remaining scenes could be filmed without any problems, and overall we were very happy with the footage we had filmed on this shoot. We could have improved some things though; we noticed a water bottle in one of our shots whilst editing which, as these shots were supposed to be set in the 1940's, did not fit with our setting. Also during editing, we realised that one of our actors was too loud and used some phrases which would not have been used in the 1940's, which we could have rectified by directing him more when shooting.