Filming 2: Dubai

Me and Stuart arrived in Dubai on the 26th of October. We spent the 27th looking around for filming locations we could use. We decided on 5 different locations listed below.
-My parents house in Um Sequim 3
-The construction site across the road from my parents house. Was not in use when we filmed there.
-Jumeriah Beach Hotel
-Mall of the Emirates

I am going to load some of my raw clips onto this post and then discuss about them and my thought process behind them. Why it worked, why it didn't etc.
The first two clips I' am going to show you are from the front gate of my parents house. The Idea was to have the FIXER (Stuart) sneak along a wall and then quickly lock pick the gate and go in.
Below I' am going to show two of the 12 takes I took.









When i decided to do these shots the idea was to show the FIXER sneaking up to the gate and opening it with a lock pick. The idea being that I would take these two clips and a third one and morph them into one fluid clip. Now lets take these two apart. When I got back to and looked over these two clips in more detail I straight away cast it aside. There several things that didn't make sense. In the clips you can clearly see that its a street and you can hear cars coming past. Your not going to try and sneak around on a busy street, its gonna be blatantly obvious that you are up to no good. So these two clips and there other similar clips got a big X through them.

Then I considered the idea of him Infiltrating the house and how he would be dressed. So I went through my closet, found a black hood, went down stairs got a blade out of the kitchen door (making sure that it wasn't a regular kitchen knife) and then we went up stairs to the top floor to film. This shot was something akin to a ninja scene.





In the end I did end up using this clip for my teaser trailer and there some good points about it and some bad points. When filming takes the director is always going to want to change something and the actors can get reasonably annoyed about this, as you can see in this clip. Stuart stamps his way back up the stairs and sighs after I tell him to do it again. One negative point to consider about this is his arms, he probably should have been wearing a long sleeve shirt but its not a major issue. Other than that he moved down the stairs in a silent appropriate manner giving off the connotations that he silent stalking through a house have come in through the rough. Bare in mind that for the final teaser cut this clip to be a lot shorter and sped up the clip as well.

The next day we decided to film a couple of running shots in the construction site across the road from my parents house. Now bare in mind that it might just look like sand with a couple dumber trucks on it, but there are houses being built all around it. I' am going to upload 2 clips of different angles I tried. my original idea was to have 3 different shots that would be morphed into one to make one continuous running sequence.









If you have a keen eye the first thing you will notice is that he first clip was taken later on in the day then the first, which is a problem that can easily be fixed in video editing software by changing the brightness and contrast. When editing these two clips I sped up the clip so that it would look like he was running extremely fast.
These two work well linked together as they can easily transition from one to other. The first clip also has an impressive has the hazy outline of downtown Dubai in the distance, this gives the viewer the sense of place, they can tell this shot takes place in Dubai. That is assuming of course that they know roughly what downtown Dubai looks like.

Right next to the construction site is a busy main road called Al Wahysi. Dubai is well known for its expensive sports cars, so I decided to be cheeky and film one driving past. I could then speed up the image and make it look like the car was going faster. The clip wasn't to bad, I ended up using the bike as the FIXER in one of my extended teaser trailers. But for every single other shot all the cars slowed down as they approached the camera. I guess they thought it was a speed camera, I mean because to white English guys in shorts and t-shirts really look like police but who knows. Oh yes, please ignore Stuart's stupid laugh (I muted the sound for this clip when editing it)