Storyboarding and Starting Filming

The past couple of lessons have consisted of us sat as a group coming up with ideas for different shots and the order they will go in for our project. We have been researching certain films that use the same sort of idea as ours of getting ready in the morning and payed most attention to the types of shots they used. We went through a few different places that we could film for our set but decided to do alot of it at college because we had found a few places that had quite plain walls which we would use to give the impression of a mental hospital, this also meant that we could easily go and shoot some of these during our lessons. It also didn't matter too much where we filmed because alot of our shots are close ups and you won't be able to see the background very much. For some of our shots though we needed quite a homely setting, so we decided that at some point of of us would take the camera home when needed and film a couple of the shots. We needed these in homely setting because there are alot of shots to do with getting ready in the morning, like turning off the alarm clock, buttering toast, getting changed etc. and they probably wouldn't look as effective around the college.

In terms of filming, editing and getting everything done in time, we've decided to try and get all of our filming done and ready to capture in just over a week so that we would be able to re-film anything, film any extra shots if we needed to and would also leave us a little bit of space in case anything went wrong. This will then give us plenty of time to edit everything and make the final cut run really smooth and fast paced.

We've storyboarded each of our shots with details of how long we want the shot to last, what type of shot it is e.g medium, close up, long shot etc. and also a brief description on what the shot is of. One of our newest shots we thought of was, after having a close up of a tie being tightened up to cut straight to a shot of a swinging hangmans loop because it's a great contrast and puts across the hint that the characters normal, sane life won't last much longer. We didn't need to write a script because we weren't having any dialect in our opening sequence at all, as we don't want to make it like a proper scene and felt it didn't need speech.



In todays lesson we were ready to film and we had a new idea which involved making good use of the snow outside. We thought that the sound of crunching snow as you step through it would sound really good if exaggerated a little in out opening sequence, also the shot of fast paced footsteps would make quite a good strange/insane styled shot so we went out and filmed each of these. In this lesson we also decided to film a shot of the character in a straight jacket, crouched up in a corner rocking back and forth. We found a good spot to do this which was quite plain looking which we needed because thats what mental institutions are usually seen as. We filmed this shot a bit longer than what our other shots will be like because we knew we wanted this particular shot to be shown a few times throughout as it's quite a strong shot in terms of insanity and what part of the characters like.