Filming - The First Day

Upon the first day of filming, we had the basic plan in mind for what we were going to achieve across the three-day period. We had planned it so that the filming itself would take several hours to complete, as we would be repeating each and every shot a minimum of three times in order for us to have a wider variety during production to choose from, and to highlight the best clips from the array. This worked well, and on the first day we planned to do all of the scenes downstairs within the house. We worked chronolocially, as we felt it would be the best course of action, and that starting from any point other than the beginning would confuse us at a later stage. We filmed John entering the house, through the doorway, with the medium shot watching him cautiously observing the scene of the murder.

John was dressed in his coat, which was the nearest piece of equipment we could find to make him look like a detective. We were thinking originally to give him a pipe and a deerstalker hat, though that decision was scrapped as it was deemed 'too historic', and we didn't want John looking like a Sherlock Holmes impersonator. Therefore, we kept the clothing of John fairly simple; he looks like a protagonist, and it's quite obvious that his role is to investigate the murder at the estate. The medium shot turned to a low-angle shot looking up at John as he watches the surroundings, first glancing at the staircase, and then to the kitchen. We followed John through a side window in one of the rooms attached to the hallway, so that John is seen walking by (an effect that we are quite proud of, and it's conveniant that the window was there). We did, in retrospect, try to include a wide variety of shots within our Final Production, and I can personally think of three right now which were a brainwave we had, though I'll mention them at the key points where we filmed them. John is then shown walking into the kitchen, with an over-the-shoulder shot tracking his viewpoint. We later on added a clip where John is seen observing the table in the kitchen through the bannister of the staircase, though we filmed that on the third day as an addition. For now, John turned around a wall and noticed a knife rack ahead.

The knife rack scene was infamous within our filming, as it certainly took longer than any other shot to perfect. The ultimate aim was to make the scene from nightvision to standard, and vice-versa, occur without any difference in clip. Therefore, when we lifted the camera to track John's view as he closed in on the knife rack (point of view shot), we had to hold the camera directly still in midair, without a flicker of movement, in order to switch to the night vision shot, where we could see back in time to what happened, and to explain why the knife was missing. This shot took forever to do - I think the overall total was thirty-something minutes just filming the exact same scene over and over again, to make the scene change from standard to night-vision look flawless without any movement. Eventually we managed to hit the nail on the head and acquire the shot which we wanted, and we also managed to get a pretty impressive shot of the knife shimmering in the sunlight (even though we changed to resolution of the camera to make it appear dark), which works well and shows the villains evil intent.

During the first day, we also shot the clips of Ian on the floor, writhing in pain and struggling. Though in the Final Production, these shots were cut down drastically (a couple of seconds, if that), we actually filmed him struggling for minutes, so that we could get the best possibly shot. We're glad with how it came out, and though we'd have liked to have kept some of the other aspects of this scene within, we're glad with how quick shots work well in relation to the bursts of sound which accompany them within The Final Production.

The First Day was a success in our opinion, and we filmed much of the content of the latter two days.