19/12/11: Filming Report

Today, after months of planning, location hunting, casting and negotiating filming times with our actors, our group members and our actors finally met up for the filming of our trailer! We scheduled to meet up at 10:00 at Folkestone Bus Station, then head to Dymchurch where we could use Megan's house as a base for getting our actors dressed and made-up and then set out to the vast and deserted fields as the location for our filming. However, one of our actors (who was meant to be acting as the antagonist - 'Bully Edwards') made a last-minute decision to drop out due as he was not feeling well. This meant that we had to make quick changes to some aspects of the trailer by cutting out our comedic character, 'Grave Digger', and reassign roles with the actors that we had remaining. It was decided that our actor who was orginally casted for 'Grave Digger' would play our bad boy of the movie, 'Sheriff Bully Edwards'. Although, we were slightly behind on our schedule, we managed to get all our actors dressed up and to our filming location.

For the first filming site, we chose a deserted field near Megan's house as it thought it would be the best representative of the vast, dry lands of the Souther parts of USA that Western movies are set in. In this site, we were to film the ending scenes of the trailer - the 'shoot-out' scene.

Here, we had a few problems in terms of trying to find the perfect camera angle in which modern developments and technology would not be seen. Although, the location was rather deserted, there were several interuptions such as buildings in the distance, telephone and electricity lines and so on. However, after a bit of moving around and with Megan's excellent camera skills we managed to find angles in which none of them were present!

We then managed to get all the necessary shots that we needed from the location so we decided to move on. We would've liked to re-do some of the scenes in order to get even better shots, however, although we had checked the weather forecast beforehand, the weather was not on our side with sudden showers of rain so we were unable to spend much longer in that location. After that, we managed to get a few establishing shots (such as of train tracks and so on). Then, we headed over to Sophie's (our actress) house, which with its all wood and rustic charm was the perfect filming location for our indoor scenes.

We used Sophie's kitchen area, in which we had to create our 'bar' set. The covering up of modern appliances and products turned out to be much harder task than expected ... But after a lot of moving things around and a lot of covering things with towels, we finally managed to turn Sophie's kitchen into a convincing Western bar! We also adjected the lighting to make it dimmer, in order to recreate a more older and natural feel. Also, we felt that the shadows would aid in conveying a mysterious vibe to the audience.

So, after a long while of shooting inside Sophie's house (the actors found it very hard to keep a straight face ... haha), we finally managed to finished the filming! We then moved on to do the photoshoot for the magazine cover and the posters, for which we had to use several other light sources such as extra lamps and torches from several different angles in order to create light and shadows exactly where we wanted it. And that concluded our long day of filming! Despite having to cope with last minute changes, time constraints and after giving much direction to our actors and with Megan diligently working behind the camera, we managed to get some good material for the trailer.

And now the long process of editing begins ...