Filming Session 12/02/09

In this session we focussed on getting all the shots that we needed for our new idea so that we would be at the same point as the other groups. Having previously arranged to meet at Miles' house we were able to get started fairly quickly, before Sevda and Topaz had arrived the establishing shots had already been done so that all we'd have to film was the action. With filming the establishing shots there were some complications these being that to be able to get what we wanted in the shot the tripod had to be placed on a table so it was quite difficult to see if what we were filming was decent because the screen was high up. Also when it came to filming Topaz from a bird's eye view going down the stairs (which I had decided would be good to include after seeing it in a thriller drama on TV, Whitechapel) it was hard to position the tripod in the right place because the tripod would not fit in the corner of the balcony resulting in the filming being shakey.

The first scenes that we started to film when Topaz arrived was the arrival of the woman. We decided that we wanted to film this in many different ways so that we had a wide range of shot types showing the same thing which we could choose from. The first way in which we filmed it was tracking her from behind a gate type fence, we thought that we could show this and then have a match cut to her walking down the stairs. It was whilst we was filming this that I saw Topaz's shadow on the wall and thought that instead of showing her properly we could with hold her identity for a little longer and film her shadow walking towards the stairs instead. To do this we had to get the camera in the right position to make sure that we would not be able to see the shadow of the camera and the rest of us in the shot too. From this we went on to film Topaz walking down the steps and we thought that the best way to do this would be to have a low angle shot from the bottom of the stairs so that you can see her footsteps coming towards the camera and not her face, again this was because we wanted the audience to still be questioning who she is and what she looks like.

After we got the outside shots done we then moved on to the shots in the basement, like when we were filming Topaz walking upto the building we filmed her walking into the basement from many different angles so that we'd have more to play around with when editing. One of these shots that I think is particularly successful is the worms eye view shot of Topaz's feet as she throws a box at the camera.

We managed to film all of the shots that we needed to quite quickly and were very pleased with what we had and could not wait to get to college to start editing.