Filming

On the day of the shoot we arrived quite early with all the equipment we needed, props and storyboards. We decided to film backwards meaning that we could use the time before the actress arrived to construct the den and then shoot the film backwards shot by shot decontructing the den rather than building it as we filmed, this saved a lot on time especially as by the end of the shoot... we had already put everything away. The actress had to take some time to get into character as she had a lot of tattoos and piercings so they had to be hidden well with long sleeves and removing all of the piercings. We took plenty of pictures so that the den could easily be recontructed if we needed to get a shot again and this was in order to keep the continuity, I think we did this quite well and doubt that anybody would realise we took the den down rather than put it up during the film. I really liked how the lighting worked on set and the spotlight created some great shadows and silhouettes, exactly what I had hoped for. We used mostly handheld for this film as it creates a much closer bond between the audience and the protagonist, being literally close to the actress can make you feel more emotionally close to them. We stuck to the storyboard (backwards but still stuck to it) and occasionally added a few more shots on the day just to make sure we definately had coverage of every action. One of my favourite shots was the silhouette from behind the den of the actress hugging her teddy as I thought it showed the emotion that we were going for really well, the character was clearly feeling safe and content with herself at that time. While filming we had issues with the camera as we had been filming all day and the battery died when we still had 4-5 shots to get and this added a large amount of time to the shoot, in future we will be bringing a spare fully charged battery with us as that was massively time consuming and ruined a really good shot when the camera died half way through a take. We also ran out of space on the 16GB memory card because of shooting in such high definition but realised that I had not been deleting the bad takes of every shot so managed to make enough space that way, we will also need to take a spare SD card to the next shoot aswell. I mostly worked with the director on the day of the shoot as we both discussed every shot in great detail and I would make sure the director was happy with everything that I had filmed before moving on, luckily I believe we had a very similar idea as to what the vision was for this film so this made the shooting run very smoothly and I could be left to my own devices for a few of the shot, which saves a lot of time. The actress we got was also very helpful and patient with us which was a very big help, she would help us to get shots even if it was taking ages such as the ones in a confined space and give friendly suggestions if we could not figure out how best to get a shot such as the extreme close ups and POV shots. By the time we got to the end of shooting it had become dark and we had to use a big fill light to replicate a bit of sunlight so it was lucky we came with so much lighting equipment as we had not expected to be shooting for such a long time. We were also lucky to use Hannah's house as it does not appear to look very much like a student house at all and ended up being a perfect location for our film although the sofas were not suitable to build a den with as I had been banking on using them as part of the set. Luckily we managed to improvise and make something very similar to what I had planned anyway. (It was a very nice nostalgic trip back into our childhood building that den) and in fact it was probably an improvement as we decided that a young girl would struggle to move big sofas about and this would confuse the audience if they were to pick up on it.