On Monday Patrick, Tom, Charles and I traveled to Patrick’s grandparent’s farm, the Moat Farm that gives its name to our film. There we spend the majority of the day filming and managed to get all of our intended and planned shots filmed, plus a few more, so we have plenty of footage to use when it comes to editing.
The first thing we did was take photos of our two actors, Olly and Lewis, looking at the scrapbook on the bed so we had a photo to stick in at the end of the scrapbook. It took quite a while messing about with the lighting and the ISO settings of the camera to create the shadow that we wanted by the doorway where our killer would be standing. We couldn’t get it quite how we wanted but we discovered that we could just darken the photo to emphasise the shadows on the laptop before we printed it. Of course, typically, we came up against another problem when the printer ran out of ink and we had to spend a short while trying to figure out how to change the ink cartridges. But after we sorted it everything went rather smoothly and we didn’t have many other problems.
After taking the photo of the boys and printing it, we decided to get all the outdoor shots done and out of the way before the light started to go. We encountered a slight problem there as when we were trying to film the shots of the farm sign we couldn’t get the camera at a suitable height on the tripod. So we had to prop it up on a bin, but that wasn’t particularly stable due to how windy it was. However, we managed to work together to stabilise the camera as best we could and get the shots we needed, and any shots that are a bit wobbly we can stabilise post production in editing.
Once we had taken all the exterior shots of the farm house we went inside to film the rest of the shots that were needed, which thankfully were all inside the far house where it was warm and out of the wind. Then we got on with filming the rest of the shots and managed to do so without any problems. We filmed all the shots we had planned to film and also filmed some extra shots so we had filler footage if it was needed; we filmed shots of a clock and also out of the bedroom window, as well as some footage taken on Tom’s phone from inside a drawer when one of the boys opened it just as an experiment.
We purposely decided to break the 180° rule at times when the boys are running through the house up to the bedroom as we wanted it to be a bit disorientating. This also made it a bit easier for us when filming because of parts of the house and where there was space to film properly and get good shots.
All in all it was a very successful day of filming and we don’t think we are going to have to return to film any more footage as we are all very happy with what we’ve got.
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