Film Shoot Reflection - SCENE 2

Sam setting up the tent

Sam placing the keys, coins and phone

Scene 2 was our last scene to film- the crime scene. Although it is supposed to take place in the same location as scene 3, the train station, we instead made the decision to film at college in the car park. It was incredibly more convenient than travelling all the way to the train station, plus ensured we would be allowed to set up a tent. It also helped minimise public interference as we chose a quiet area of the car park, plus most pupils and students were in lesson over the duration of our filming. Originally we had planned to use our college's drama studio but unfortunately it was booked up. This change of location again meant that some alterations had to be done to our shot list.


Sam and I arrived to college extremely early and began setting up straight away. The night before we had set up traffic cones in our desired area to stop other people from parking there. We started by setting up the tent that we had collected from the member of staff involved with the Duke of Edinburgh Award. Myself, Sam and our teacher struggled against the wind and the rain to set up the tent before transporting the equipment and other props over. One of us had to remain with the tent at all times to ensure it didn't blow away in the wind- we had a few near misses. We then built our crime scene, carefully placing the scattered keys, coins and phone using a printed photo we had taken the week before, making sure they were put in the same place for the sake of continuity. We also covered our scene in police tape. We then dressed our actors in their police and crime scene photographer outfits.

Crime scene photographer (helping hold the tent)

Police officer

An hour and a half after initially arriving our two main actors arrived. They arrived in our requested outfits for them meaning that as soon as they arrived we were pretty much ready to get straight into filming. Our actress was busy with an A Level Drama performance and the body double we used in the morgue scene was unfortunately also unavailable which we were informed of very last minute. Instead, we again had to improvise and Sam dressed in the coat our actress wore in the murder scene, and covered himself with the sheet.



Me filming with a blue filter

This scene involved one tracking shot for which we decided to use the steadicam rather than the dolly. This is because I wanted the tracking shot to feel like a point of view shot following the detective and make the audience feel as if they were actually a part of the crime scene- very immersive. For all of the other shots we kept it on a tripod, keeping the shots steady. As Sam was under the sheet for most of the shoot I found it a struggle to quickly adjust the tripod legs according to the desired shot, so occasionally additional help was required from our extras.

One major issue we had was the weather. The rain was very on and off, with strong winds battering against the sides of the tent very persistently. As the tent was not pegged into the ground due to it not being grass, any extras who were not visible in a specific shot had the task of holding our tent down. It was also another extremely cold day meaning I was shaking for the entire scene, despite layering up. This was a problem I could not really overcome, but had to tolerate instead.

I filmed the entire scene similarly to the morgue scene- doing a minimum of two takes for each shot, one normal and one with a blue filter. Despite the effort this required we ended up deciding that we preferred the normal shots.

Overall Sam and I were happy with how it went. The weather was against us and made things incredibly difficult, but we persisted and the end resulting footage looked good.