Filming

Once I found actors I could find their costumes, and various other equipment which was needed for the shoot. For Harry I told him wear black jeans and a white shirt, the white shirt shows a contrast between Harry and the darkness. I told Abby to wear a navy top, black leggings and to also tie her hair up because it shows her face more and therefore you are able to see her emotion. For Grant I told him to wear a black top and blue jeans for the scenes where he is Freddy and I bought the clown costume which cost £40 for the scenes where Grant had to show the split. The costumes are a very important part of mise-en-scene and contain a lot of connotations. I considered these carefully as Harry was wearing the brightest colour (white) which symbolises his neutral position. This contrasts to the other two characters, especially Grant who is wearing black, which shows the audience that he is less emotionally involved with Grant, and to an extent, Abby. Abby is wearing a navy top which identifies her more with Grant showing that she is emotionally involved with him but its darker tone suggests that she is in more in danger than Harry’s character. Grant is wearing black because it symbolises the danger he is in and the danger he may inflict upon others as well as being to show the darker side to his nature.

To help me with camera work and the changing of scenes I asked George Hopkin, who is also doing A2 Media Studies, to assist me and give me continuous feedback. I used two Panasonic SDR-S26 video cameras, which film in HD for higher quality. I used these new media technologies as it makes the film quality, filming process and editing stages both easier and much more effective than the technologies which were available in the past. I also used tripod for all of my shots to maintain the camera at a level and steady position to reduce camera shake and blurring. I did not use an external microphone because I did not think it was necessary as there is not much speech and the built in HD microphone in the camera was sufficient for this.
To create the trailer I used several camera angles such as medium close-ups, over the shoulder shot and low angle shots. I will talk about the effect of these shots later, but the camera positions and angles were also important in terms of lighting. On the whole I used low-key lighting to emphasise the literal darkness of both the plot and the Freddy character.

I filmed on october 15th at Harry's house, it was the perfect location because for the low-key lighting and large rooms. I filmed all the scenes except for the scene when Grant is outside and forcing a shovel into the ground because it was raining. The evening went well, it could've gone better. I came back to school, uploaded the pictures I had taken and the film clips. While looking through the filming clips I didn't quite think they worked so I decided to film them all again on November 12th.

The first filming night didn't go according to plan but I took some pictures so I could start on my poster and I could do the first scene of the trailer (where there is an image of Grant and am image of the clown with a cross-fade in between).

The opening clip, which is when Grant turns into the Clown, was done by using two images but the subjects in both of these images were at different heights and therefore their eyes were not in line with one another. I went into PhotoShop (a new media technology) and selected the two pictures I wanted and firstly I cropped both of the images to the size I was using for the videos (which is 16:9). I then used rulers on PhotoShop to mark out where the eyes on the clown started, finished and where the pupil is. I then put those measurements onto Grant’s picture and saw I had to move them over to the left by two centimetres. I then used the quick select tool to select Grant and I moved him over to where he was supposed to be. This left me with a white background where Grant used to be so I went to select and then inverse so the background was now selected. This meant I could fill in the background using the clown stamp tool without getting the original background colour on Grant. For this opening scene I decided to use images rather than video because images are easy to manipulate on PhotoShop as there is no movement to interfere with the desired effect. To give the effect that Freddy was transforming into the Clown I used a cross-fading effect on Coral Video Editor 12.