After Arcadia Production

We started the day on schedule by meeting this morning at 10am along with Alex as our guide to the filming location; once we got off the bus we made a quick 10-minute walk down to the quarry. Because we hadn't done a recce shot, we were very reliant on Alex’s knowledge of the location. I spent some time with Bob and Joe scanning the surrounding area for the best way to shoot the footage using Bob’s storyboards as a reference point. Also whilst surveying the area I kept a keen eye out for specific shots that would suit a montage scene to build up an atmosphere and environment that our character would be travelling across and in tone with the overall genre of the piece. The main problem that we realized was the limitations of how we could shoot some scenes, we really weren't able to shoot any extremely long shots of the character because of the quarry walls would be in shot, so we weren't able to portray to well the idea of our character being in a huge open landscape. Also I wasn't really able to capture the sky because of numerous houses would have been captured in shot, which would have ruined our vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

Before we started the shoot, I said that whilst the establishing shoot was being set up I would create 3 different User Preferences in camera; which only took about 15 minutes for me to create 3 contrasting set-ups, once I had finalised the 3 set ups I showed each of them to Joe and together we agreed on the User Preference that best captures the vision of the style for the film.

User 1: Picture Style Neutral, Sharpness 3, Contrast -4, Saturation +4, Colour Tone -4

I thought that by doing this it might be useful for when the film went into post-production, but though the idea of having the Saturation and Colour Tone settings this way, in theory might work, I really didn’t like how the image was looking in camera, it just looked too full of life.

User 2: Picture Style Neutral, Sharpness 3, Contrast -2, Saturation -2, Colour Tone +4.

I really liked the visual style of this set up; the contrast was only slightly reduced down and the life seems to be drained from the colours with the saturation and colour tone settings.

User 3: Picture Style Standard, Sharpness 2, Contrast -3, Saturation +2, Colour Tone -2

I actually quite liked this set up as well; despite the image in camera still having vibrant colours, I thought that this could be reduced in post-production with colour correction.

I showed all 3 of these set ups to Joe and we both decided that User 2 was definitely the best option as the image in camera was really close to the what we had imagined before the shoot. Though after a brief talk we had agreed that we probably weren’t going to be able to achieve the post apocalyptic world look, as the location didn’t give us much to work with and the costume that we had for the actor didn’t look anywhere near dirty enough, included the actor himself.

We started the shoot by working along side the shooting schedule that I had compiled earlier in the week, whilst using Bob’s illustrated storyboards as a great visual reference point. Unfortunately straight away we experienced technical problems on set with the recording of sound; the Marantz that we booked out was faulty (Phone Jack and Battery Compartment) so we had to make do with the on board sound from the Canon 550D.

The shoot itself went really well and between each shot I kept good communication between myself and Joe on how each shot was going to be set up and framed and also how each shot looked after each take and whether or not I felt that it was a success or not. We had known beforehand that the chance of rain was pretty high and right on cue after shooting a key scene of our character eating a woodlouse, heavens opening and the rain came pouring down, luckily we had brought a tent to keep the equipment in and had a large umbrella to keep the camera and lenses dry; we knew that this would cause a big continuity error with regards to the weather, but because this was our only available shoot day we decided to carry on regardless.

The umbrella became a big help to me on set as there was always someone there on set to hold the umbrella over me as I set up each shot in the dry without having to worry about getting too much water on my camera and the lens itself.

After we had completed the filming of the opening scene we decided to go ahead with my idea of shooting a montage scene; this gave me a Bob a great opportunity to have a much more creative input to the shoot day, we had already scouted out some really promising areas that we could exploit to convey an atmosphere that reflected the story as a whole. One area in specific was this small and dirty pond like area that look like something out of post apocalyptic world. We also noticed on our way into the quarry that there was an old abandoned building that had seen better days, and we thought that it would be a great place to shoot our closing shot for the montage with our character finding a baby’s toy (which Bob had brought along with him to the shoot) in this building. In fact it turned out that both these shots were something that had already been included within Bob’s storyboards where the character was collecting water and finding a toy.

Being on set as the D.O.P and the Camera Operator, I decided that it was essential to keep my own shot list throughout the day, and it proved to be very helpful as I was able to keep track of what we had shot in regards to the original plan in the shooting schedule and also will be a massive help for when we get the footage into post-production tomorrow in the edit suite as I’ve got each shot listed with all the technical settings and more importantly which shots were successful; this should save us a huge amount of time in the edit.

Though I don’t believe that during our test shoot we have be able to capture a believable post apocalyptic world, I do feel that the visual style that I made in the camera really does suit the genre of the piece, as the footage itself looks like the colour has had the life drained out of it, just like the world in the story has been drained of life. And I hope to amplify these feeling with colour correction in the post-production of the film, which we beginning the edit tomorrow.