Filming Narrative

Despite the story being told backwards and dealing with problems we adapted to and solved we filmed chronologically with our murder scene being filmed first, then the running scene and fire with the climactic suicide of our husband character.

We organised to meet during an evening when we were all free and before we did we prepared a list of shots we needed to cover and how much time we needed to film. This proved useful and we set up the camera in the living room for our murder/death scene. We had to reshoot the bloody hands later on as the red colouring that we used for blood didn't look real enough to emotionally affect our audience.

At around 9 o'clock at n we headed out to Black's Path to film the scenes in which our protagonist is on the run. We started out with the fire scene as we felt that it made more sense to start with our most difficult scenes as they would consume the most amount of time. It took us a while to start the fire and find logs for our actor to sit on, but after arranging our set and setting up the camera to get the perfect image, we started the fire, but all the while making sure we kept it under control, as well as keeping at a safe distant from the fire so that he wouldn't get burnt. One problem that we encountered was that we didn't have enough copies of the photo to burn so we had the pressure of getting the shot the way we wanted in two attempts.

After extinguishing the fire, we wanted to film the torches scenes straight away as the police stumble across the fire just shortly as it was extinguished. To film this two members of our group climbed up a hill to reach a point just overlooking the spot in which our protagonist was resting. Here we filmed several takes of the lights discovering the spot so that we got the right angle, lighting and effects. After this lighting scene we moved onto the scene where the torches are almost on our main character. We had to film this several times to make sure we knew the exact moment the torches would land on our character, as well as how far he would run before getting caught. The end result looked good on camera with the torch shining right on the spot where our character was just after he had made a break for it.

After the torch scenes we set out immediately to film the running scenes. These scenes took the longest to film, and were also the most difficult. Due to filming in the dark we had problems with lighting, so we decided to use the torches as lighting, we initially had problems making the light look natural in the shots when he wasn't being followed but by positioning the torches further away solved this. The running scenes were set in different locations so we had to figure out where would be the best position to film so that we could create a fluid panning shot for both clips without the scenes jumping, what we did was we progressed up the path like we would normally and stopped to film each shot.

After the running/chase scenes were filmed we only had the suicide scene to film for that night, and after a slight hike up a rather steep hill we found a spot that our actor could fall from in which,using a bit of camera trickery, looked like he was jumping, when in reality he was falling onto the slope of the hill. Before we filmed we had to mark out where our character step to and fall so that he wasn't injured. Then we walked back up the hill and filmed the character running to that spot from a wide shot, mid shot, and different angles specified in the storyboard. Due to it being very dark we once more had to use the torches for light, but we worked them in with the narrative by making the conscious decision of having the character get caught.

We didn't get to film the heaven/afterlife scene until after easter but the script and as a result the video had been changed to a more ambiguous ending with less of our shots that we recorded that were more happy. The reedited scene worked better with the haunting images before the character falls to his doom.