Filming

On Thursday 27th October my group and I went to St Osburgs church hall to film some of our scenes, in the previous week we had discussed that we should film both characters scenes separately as the villain requires very dramatic make up and very big dramatic hair, whereas the mental home patient is the very opposite, she has neat blunt straight hair and no make up, so it would be difficult to do both sets of make up in a limited time. So we filmed most of the scenes with the villain earlier and the scenes that we had to film today were only of the mental home patient.

When we arrived at the church we quickly sorted Shona's hair, costume and make up so that we could start filming. The first scene that we filmed was a scene showing the mental home patient walking in a straight line towards a set of doors, this scene would be at the start of our trailer and would show the mental home patient entering the mental home. For this scene we had to film it a few times until we were satisfied with how it looked, in the end we chose to film the patient from the back, and chose to use a long shot so that you could see the characters full body. The reason we chose to film the character from behind was to create a sense of mystery, also we thought that having the character walking away from the camera would make her see annonymous to the viewer. Overall I think that this scene had the scary unusual edge that we had wanted to create and I think that it is a very effective opening scene to our trailer.



Filming from a high angle



The second clip that we had to film was of Scarlet (as the mental home patient) in her cell. For this clip we had all agreed that this should be filmed using a high angle shot as this would make the shot look like a realistic survailance camera. We found the high angle shot was hard to create at first we tried lifting the camera as high as possible but found that doing this would often make the camera shaky, so we did find that it took a while to get used to the angle. The scene would show Scarlet sitting very still on a chair, however as we wanted the viewers to see Scarlet clearly we opted to film this scene from a long shot rather that a high angle, we felt that this worked much better and looked much more effective .



Filming from a long shot

We had decided to change this scene slightly, we decided at first to have Shona looking up at the camera (when we thought we were filiming from a high angle), we then decided to have Shona with her head down, hair covering her face and then slowly she would lift her head and look at the camera menecingly. However when looking at this on camera we felt that it would look more effective if Shona instead just glared at the camera looking innocent, confused and frozen.
Next we had to film the scene where Shona would be sitting on the floor rocking herself and crying - this would be because she was remembering her sister - this angle was done from a high angle shot as we thought that it was important to use a variety of shot types - we had solved this problem by filming the scene while standing on a bench and trying to keep as still and possible, we found that after a few takes we had got the scene we needed. Now we had to use a long shot again which showed  Scarlet having a nightmare she would need to lie on the floor and roll around screaming and the jolt up , as we needed this scene to be dark we turned out the lights - in all of the scenes today we used a fuzzy film grain effect on my camera to make the footage appear 'old' in this dark scene we made sure that Shona could still be seen, we found this scene quite easy to film once having a 'practice run'. The scene would show Scarlet having a nightmare after the audience see her sister being murdered.


The Ghost Scene - looking at this shot you can see that I need
to move forward as I am not very visible on camera.

 The next scene we felt would be much more difficult as it would show Scarlet's sister, played by myself appear in the reflection of an old mirror - we had to practice this scene a few times and decided to film the clips separately. First we had to film Shona looking into the mirror, then we filmed me standind behind her, and then we filmed Shona seeing me and turning around. We knew that we would have to merge these clips together on Movie Maker so filming them separately would not be a problem.
The final scene of the day would be Scarlet running into her old house and remenisimg - this scene would be before the mirror scene as in this scene she would noticice her old family mirror which is where she would see her sister.

As the stage itself was very plain we needed to make it look more like a house to do this we moved the church benches to the corners of the walls, found an old table and chairs which we brought onto the stage and used some of our own things to make it look messy, this includes coats, sheets to make the house look abandoned and papers which we threw around the stage, we were quite pleased with how we had changed the stage as it did look like an abandoned living room.
For this scene Shona would run in and start to clean up her house, she would look around dazed and confused until noticing the old mirrot which she remembered from her childhood, this scene was an long shot so that the viewers would be able to see the whole house and look at everything that Scarlet was doing.