Filming

We went out to film my sequence today, and it went amazingly well. Once we had picked up the cast and driven down to Kirk's house so we could walk to the set we started to film the second half of the film. We had to film the second part because it is set in the day, and the first part is set at night, so we decided to record it backwards.

It started out a little badly, because the cast weren't exactly sure what was going on, i had given them the idea and shown them the storyboards and whatnot, but it's a little different when you actually try to record it. So after we had recorded it all we went back and decided to record it again as now they knew what they had to do, they could do it better and more proffesionally. This would then look better when i come to edit the footage and wouldn't look so 'studenty', although i wasn't sure what archaeologists wore so i told them to turn up in casual clothing and gave them some archaeology hats to wear.

I spent a while looking for the mise-en-scene i would need for this scene to work, and while not perfect i managed to find costumes, a sword, and a tresaure chest. Luckily, i also managed to get hold of some cloth and some parafin so we could make the flaming torches, we found suitable sticks on the way to the set. Unfortunately nobody bought any string so i had to sacrifice some of my hairbands to help the cloth to the sticks, though it was totally worth it! Also, we only had 6 matches, and i had lost my lighter, nobody in the group smoked and we didn't have any spare matches, so we were counting on the parafin catching first time.

After we filmed the initial footage, we decided to do it from some different angles to make the film more interesting, unfortunately, we got most of the film done in the first few takes, so turning up at 2 was possibly not the best idea as we then had 3 hours kicking around until it got dark. We decided we should change some of the scenery around to kill some time. Unfortunately as we were in a forest there wasn't very much we could do to change it... Or was there? As we had so much time we decided we would put some extra trees in the film. As the beggining but was set hundreds of years ago they would probably have been cut down anyway as they were in the middle of the path. They also made it look much better when the soldiers ran towards the monk guy as they had to run around the trees instead of having a clear path. I think this looks much better than it would have done.. It also killed the time quite nicely as we had to dig holes about 2 foot deep so the trees wouldn't fall over.

When it got to about 6 o clock, it wasn't really dark, but dark enough for the camera to think it was and give the much desired effect i hope the torched would give. We weren't quite sure how to get the parafin onto the cloths we used as torches without setting ourselves on fire, so somebody decided to dip the rag into the bottle, but that didn't work. In the end i threw the cloth on the floor and pured some on that way, then tied it to the stick and lit it. Luckily the parafin lit with the second match, and we lit the other from that same torch, which was a good idea. The container said you should use dirt to put out the fire, should it get out of hand and we had been digging all afternoon, so we had plenty of dirt and were right next to a lake - so we decided it was safe enough. We set the first one alight, and it looked amazing. It gave a better effect than i could have hoped for - or at least i think it did - i won't know for sure until i can edit the footage but from the cameras perspective it looked amazing. We then proceeded to light another one for the soldiers to carry while they chase the man, this worked quite well but then fell apart as was tied on with an elastic band which melted. So we gave them another one and re-filmed it. It looked fantastic