Filming 4: St. Emunds College

Unfortunately I spend most of the school year living at boarding school which provides a rather big problem. The one location you want to avoid filming at is your school. There is nothing worse then a film that was shot at a school. In my case I had no choice, so I had to film in locations that didn't represent or look like a school as much as possible. This was a big challenge to start off with. I started off by going around the school and the school grounds looking for areas that I could use to film that didn't represent a school. One advantage to St. Edmunds College in filming terms is the fact that its such an old building, it doesn't look like most modern schools. As a result if you can avoid areas with signs, school logos or anything that looks like a classroom or school corridor you should be fine.

I spent several hours walking around during lunch time and it occurred to me that it would be much better to look for good filming areas at night. The FIXER being a highly skilled agent isn't going to infiltrate a building in daylight. He would do it at night and as a result I started looking at night using only natural lighting too keep to the naturalistic themes commonly seen in action thriller genre.

Once I picked out a few areas I started to brain storm some ideas
of what I could portray. I took several different shots and i experimented with different angles.
Below are a few of the clips I took. I' am going to look at each one and talking about what works and what doesn't.



There are a few reasons why this shot works well. Number one being the fact cant really tell its a school which is objective number 1. Having the FIXER walk into the shot and then walking through it, is a powerful image. This is emphasized by the gun he carries and the hot breath in the cold air. Dressed in all black and armed its clear that hes walking towards this building with the intent of doing some damage. These are all connotations that an audience can pick up on.
When editing this clip I would cut it down a lot. I would make him instantly walk into the shot and have it cut when hes about half way. This makes the shot long enough to provide a powerful image but all stops the clips from becoming boring. I would also mute the clips sound.




Note please ignore my coughing I was ill at the time so I apologise.

Most black op operatives are often regarded as ghosts, they can go into and area and complete a task with anyone ever knowing they were there. I ponder on how I could achieve the idea of the FIXER being a ghost with the equipment, and I had an idea. If your filming at night your camera can often become de-focused, this results in a blurring affect to movement or pix elation. Your camera will often try to refocuses it self or not let you take any video till its focused. To achieve this shot i fist de-focused the camera using automatic focusing. I had to play around with it a while until it stayed de-focused. I then turned the camera to manual focus so that it would auto focus. As a result when the FIXER (Stuart) moved towards the camera his movements were blurred as a result. This gave the sense that hes was some kind of ghost.




This is apart of a fight scene that i was working on for the trailer. You may have easily figured out that its a school corridor maybe not. Its actual a very small area I had the camera right up against the wall and i had to peak my head round to see what was in the shot. This was one of the possible ideas for a struggle over a gun. This is a clip of the third take for the gun drop that these two had been working on. The reason why this clip doesn't work really well is because one its looks a little to fake and three the dropping of the gun is just to passive.









The two clips above are linked together and intended to be shown one after another. The Idea for this shot was that the FIXER would emerge from the darkness and then execute the target in question. It works because it emphasizes that idea of the agent appearing in silence from the shadows, however the two shots to the body in the second clip suggest that this kill is more personal then professional.

In terms of editing for these two clips i would have muted both. I also would shorten the length of each clip and add suppressed gun shots.