Filming Account

Monday 8th November

The day started with all of us meting in the common room and then finding a room for 2 hours to wait until the stage was free so we could set up our instruments. We had to wait because an English exam was in progress so there was little we could do apart from practice the scenes without instruments. The following 2 hours were spent practicing the shots for the ‘seduction’ scene so we could get it exactly right when it came down to filming it for real. We also had access to a plain white background (A SMART board) so Lizi was able to get changed in to her costume and we could film the ‘hair swishing’ scene there and then, as opposed to waiting till the end of the school day to film it.

All of this was going perfectly to plan until it we discovered that our bass guitar was broken. One of the strings had snapped on it so it was unusable. Chris and Rob had repeatedly tried to mend it in the last hour before we were due to film however it couldn’t be done so I had to make a directorial decision. I decided to scrap the bass guitar all together and change it to a synth keyboard, in addition to this I swapped Ben’s role of drum player around with Rob’s Bass as Ben had stated he could play a keyboard and Rob was at least mildly proficient with the drums. Once this had been decided we ran into yet another problem, The English exam had started slightly late and we hadn’t anticipated the amount of time it would take for them to collect the papers, I asked around and found out that the exam would be finishing 45minutes after we had hoped to start, this would not have given us enough time to film the whole thing before the end of school and, due to the school play, we would not have been able to continue filming after hours.

The situation was starting to look grim for us. We had one last chance to get filming done on time; the drama studio had been a possibility for us but we knew that it wasn’t finished being renovated. In a last ditch attempt to secure a location we went to the studio and luck would have it we ran in to the Head of Drama who suggested that we could use the studio for approximately 90 minutes before he had a class. This gave us just enough time to film everything we needed if we moved quickly.

We started by rearranging the drama studio to suit our needs while the half the team went to collect all the instruments we had booked previously. Once set up we quickly filmed the seduction scene and moved on to the performance. In all it took about 45 minutes to fully film the performance shots and then an added 10 minutes to get the card shower set up and filmed. We finished with, quite literally, 5 minutes before a class was due.

Overall I would say the day was a success because, for one, the weather was appalling so if we had moved the days around to film the outside scenes on the Monday we would have had a massive problem. In addition we filmed all the scenes we wanted within the time limit. It was, however, much more stressful than the Friday. This would have been due to the breakage of the bass guitar and the circumstances of the location; however we were all a little tired by then, so that may have been a cause as well.