Filming Day 3 - London - Luke

On Friday 30th November we had a staff development day at school and decided that the day would be a good time to get some of the footage that we had planned to film in London. There was, however, a problem earlier in the week as one of our actors (Ryan) had suffered a stress fracture in his foot while doing judo and was unable to act in our video anymore. We needed someone of a similar build and height to Ryan to take his place in the video without it being too obvious that it was a different person. After a lot of thinking we decided that Josh would be the best person to take over from Ryan.

One small problem with this would be that there would be less of a chance for Josh to film and direct the video as a lot of his time will be spent acting. Josh did, however, feel that he could still give feedback on how each shot went as he would be getting a different point of view than me and James who were filming. A lot of the time Josh would come back to me and James after filming a shot to say that he wasn't happy with the shot as he had seen something that we hadn't noticed. This was one of the benefits of having him as an actor. Josh did in he end film and direct the shots that he wasn't acting in, including the shots of dan running on his own.

The area that we spent most of our time filming in was along Southbank and the Soho area.

The first shots that we took on the day were of our actors running down Southbank and jumping over the many obstacles in the skatepark. After having a few initial problems with keeping the camera steady while running, and after many different shots from different angles and positions, we eventually got the shots that we needed for our video. Below you can see the pictures of us filming and directing some of the shots here.

After successfully filming the shots in the skatepark we moved on to our next location, which was running alongside the River Thames down the Southbank and the small stunt/jump that we had planned. This shot was fairly simple to film, the only problem being the large amount of people walking by that were sometimes getting in the way of me with the camera, the actors when they were running, or generally getting in shot and looking into the camera (ruining the shot).

We proceeded to move on to other areas of Soho, which gave us an endless set of locations with the exact urban looking shots that we wanted for our video. One of the best locations that we found was an alleyway just off of Oxford street that would allow us to film the actors running in a tight space, creating a sense of panic and urgency, as one wrong move would mean that the thief would be caught.



Another location we knew of in Soho was Soho Square, a greener location which we thought would link in well with another shot that we had planned to film in our home town centre, Dartford. At this location we decided to try a different type of shot and started experimenting with different ways to get good feet shots with the camera still moving with the actors (a lot harder than it sounds). In the end we ended up putting the camera on my tripod, flipping the tripod upside down and running along holding the legs of the tripod with the camera only inches off of the ground. As this section was done we realised that we couldn't just have our actors running up to the building in the middle of Soho Square and then cut to them at another location as there would be no continuity. To make up for this we filmed them running around the building and along the path on the other side and towards the gate. This meant that they would be seen to be going on to another location, and it wouldn't look like they had just appeared there.

The last shot that we filmed on the day was of the actors running through Covent Garden and out through an alleyway. This location differed slightly from all of the others that we had filmed previously as there was a lot more members of the public in the area. This meant that we had to make sure that there was enough space for our actors to run through without being blocked off by anyone or knocking anyone over. We ended up getting over 7 shots at this location purely because of the large number of people and the fact that our actors kept running out of places to run into. In the picture on the right you can see Josh, Phil and Dan trying to navigate their way around the crowds of people as me and James filmed them.