Remains of the Day: Film

In this post I'll attempt to consolidate a quick and dirty film finisher with rationales, the film and any notes on my personal role in its creation.

For our film project we were given the script "Herds" written by our very own lecturer, Jools.



Most of the project files for this have been submitted but for this our group had to complete all of the following prior to any actual filming taking place:

• Risk Assessment
• Lectures on safety
• Health and Safety/BECTU 
• Brief 'Recce' of possible locations 
• Location Release forms

It was during this none-filming period which I took the time to look into the camcorders which we could borrow and after discussing my findings with the group eventually we chose to shoot the whole thing using a Panasonic AG-HPX171E. Thats somewhere between a small studio camera and a handy-cam for most normal people providing a lot of features of the first, but the convenient of the latter. The first issue I ran into here was no manual was provided and personally having little-no experience using anything similar I definitely had to go hunting around for one once that was taken care of and a few tutorials watched later I was ready to fulfill my role as camera man.


Rewrites:
As previously shown we landed the script "Herds" but we decided to take it down a more sinister path with some underlying thriller tones. This elevated our strange but friendly man turn from sandwich stealer to near body-snatching status, replacing the role of the other character and throwing him out of his own home - all taking place right within an identifiable comfort zone. The makings of a solid classic in my opinion.

Complications:
We ran into a lot of these when factoring into account a randomly a lotted group the main two of which were outside work schedules and lazy damn actors. As many people as we managed to cast for our weird flaky roles it seemed none of them were pretending the flakiness, and therefore didn't really bother to show up. If  I'd been hitting the film pathway next year I would of been annoyed but instead between the group we just picked out those who didn't have an active production role, loaded a few extra responsibilities on the others and started shooting.


** One of this for 3d work coming very soon when I can find a good way to upload supporting sketches.