Filming Day 1

We have successfully completed our first day of filming!

Video Diary
We decided to do some behind-the-scenes filming to help us document our thought processes, what worked and what challenges we faced during filming.



fig. 1

Scenes filmed

• Scene II — Phonebox scene
• Robyn's conversations
• Scene III — Meeting scene
• All shots
• Scene IV — Office reflection scene
• Shot I only 

Characters & costume



fig. 2

The characters featured in filming today were primarily Scott and Robyn, shown in costume in fig. 2. We wanted Scott to look semi-formal, dressing him in a monochrome outfit, with a shirt and loose tie. Robyn we wanted to look sophisticated, and we adapted the trope of dangerous women in red by dressing her in a red patterned coat.





fig. 3

Jade features in a single shot, and she is shown in costume in fig. 3. We dressed Jade in a dark coat so as to keep her character mysterious, but we also gave her a hat with a flower to convey innocence—although the hat and flower are also dark in colour, to convey perhaps innocence lost or tainted. We leave this ambiguous for the time being in the narrative, further fleshing her characeter out in later scenes.






Scene II


fig. 4

Our shots for the phonebox scene were filmed at St. Mary's Court, Cambridge. Ellie took a photograph of four phoneboxes on the street (fig. 1) while doing a bit of location scouting in Cambridge before the day we went out and filmed, and we liked the location very much. In the background was a church with cobblestone walls, which is very indicative of Cambridge architecture and contrasts more traditional cityscape backgrounds nicely.




fig. 6

fig. 5

The shooting for the scene went well, and we managed to get a few nice-looking stills which we could also use later for posters (fig. 4). However, filming in a phonebox did give rise to some issues (fig. 5 & 6)!
In addition to occasionally cramped filming conditions when trying to get good shots, the cable for the microphone we used did not reach very far, so we had to reframe a few shots to take this into account. We are happy with how the scene turned out, though.



Scene III (and IV)


fig. 7

We filmed scene III—and had planned to long before filming started—at the 'Reality Checkpoint', or the lamppost in the middle of Parker's Piece in the centre of Cambridge (fig. 7). It is a rather recognisable place within Cambridge and, being the only light source in the park at night, conducive to a noir look: they create great low-key lighting and appear in many classic noir films. We had hoped to film right underneath the lamppost, at the intersection of the park's two large paths, but there was a consistent heavy flow of pedestrians (and bikes!) so we decided against it, instead filming on a corner of grass next to the intersection. You can get a sense of how busy it was in the video diary.




fig. 8

Aside from the occasional interfering passer-by, we had minimal problems filming this scene. We did film at dusk, and the shoot went on for a good hour or so, so we may well need to rectify this in post-production for the sake of continuity. The shot of Robyn smoking at the beginning of Scene IV we managed to quickly film right underneath the lamppost. Again, we took some stills that we may be able to use for posters (fig. 8).