Assessing our Filming and Construction

Decisions we made:

• One of our main stylistic choices for our sequence was to have little to no moving camera shots, especially for the first half of our film. This we felt was necessary as we wanted to find a medium between having the opening start in the middle of an event for the character and building up the atmosphere and immersing the viewer in the location.
• Once the character finds the person he is assigned to kill, we have more shots where the camera is moving or panning to establish pace and build up tension.
• We decided to make the characters reasonably well dressed, with one character wearing a suit and the others wearing fairly smart clothing. We made this decision as we felt that once the characters begin acting suspiciously (receiving cryptic instructions, abruptly putting on leather gloves), the audience would have more curiosity into what is happening.

Revisions of our planned sequence:

• We were of course originally going to set the first half of our film before the main character finds his target on the DLR, though we had to change as we found filming on the trains impossible.
• We had intended to set our film at twilight to night time, though we found that the lighting at London Bridge during the middle of the afternoon was suitable for our film – sometimes harshly grey, sometimes more cool and blue, this set the somewhat bleak yet stylish tone to our film.
• On our recce, we found our original location for the alleyway scene at the end of the film – it was in a darkened car park. However, we chose a different location – round the back of an office block and terrace – for many reasons. For one thing, we found lighting the car park particularly difficult, meaning it would not have looked particularly impressive. We also particularly liked the terrace the characters walk across as they come towards the alleyway, as it was suspiciously quite at the time of our filming.

Problems we faced:

• One of our main problems was with the sound of our film. The first few shots of our sequence were on a bridge, and the middle of it was under it. This meant that we picked up a fair amount of ambient noise of cars travelling past and wind, which sometimes made our characters’ voices hard to hear. For this reason, we have had to re-record one of the opening lines.
• We also found that, at times, the lighting was difficult to work with. It was very bright and harshly lit, meaning that many of our low-angle shots of the actors or locations were often too dark on their faces or images. We managed to remedy this problem to a certain extent with our actors as we used our lights, though obviously there was no way to ensure that, for example, our low-angle shot of the Shard building was well-lit without simply having to use ambient lights.