Planning our Test Shoot

Carrying out a Test Shoot would help us get an idea of what the final sequence would look like and whether it works as an idea, it also let us know about any problems we could face whilst filming in order to solve/prevent them on the day.

General time management plan;

We decided to prioritise filming the second half of the sequence in greater detail, so we filmed the first half of her breaking into the car in few and simple shots with only around two angles for each one; her legs as she runs to the car, her lock-picking the car, and her running off screen upon hearing the distant sounds.

We then focused the greater section of our shooting time onto following her running into the shack, getting hunted and then eventually killed by the hunter. This was due to this part of the sequence consisting of more frequent and complex movement/action, it was also the main focus and source of excitement of our idea so we wanted to invest more time into shooting it well.

Props

For obvious reasons, we weren't allowed to bring real weapons into school (not that any of us owned a real battle axe either way), so we had to replace the hunter's weapon we had in mind (again - a battle axe for now) with a large umbrella as the structures resembled each other and it was size appropriate.

Very conveniently, Max from my group is an avid biker and therefore owns a motocross helmet, which he was able to bring in to stand in for the hunter's larger motorcycle helmet.

Since we also obviously couldn't (fake) hot wire any car that was available to us - a school minibus - we decided to film our backup option where the survivor simply tries to break the lock of a car with bobby pins.

Cast

We cast Joy from our group for the main role of the survivor as we decided that Max would do the majority of the filming and I would do the editing - we also got him to stand in for the hunter as he's the tallest of us and was most likely the best fit for his own helmet.

-> Max is very technically experienced with photography and would therefore know how to adjust camera settings faster than I could, and I am very passionate for editing and familiar with different editing software.

Location

Quite simply, the school minibuses were the most readily available vehicles to us, so filming the first half of the sequence in the school car park was quite straightforward.

The tool shed outside of the theatre department also matched the structure of a run down shack; a creepy wooden area with random objects inside to fill the space, and a large door.

The Shoot

The shoot itself ran very smoothly and was honestly a lot of fun to do, we got everything we needed shot just about on time.

Our group overall shares a lot of similar tastes for filming and are not afraid to bring our ideas forward, so we agreed on basically every suggestion and wasted no time in our discussions for quickly deciding the best angle/movement shot, allowing us to focus on active filming.

Max and I did however find it challenging to shoot from outside of the shed looking in or the other way around due to the stark difference in lighting being very difficult to balance on the camera, which took up some of our time whilst setting up from different angles.

I also think that our shots were too action tight and didn't leave much resting space in between each action, which would ultimately led to a much shorter sequence that could have been spaced out by having longer shots with more resting time.