Shooting day.

On Thursday, December 21st, my media group shot our horror/thriller movie, ‘Mind’, e met together at 9 am. and we started the day by assembling our set with the set designer, we tore bloody rags, and placed them on the floor and dirtied our actors white dress. We decided to set up a row of candles on screws through a piece of wood the piece of wood then went under the carpet and through it with the candles stuck on top, we did this to illuminate our female actor as she sat on the floor. I had the idea to wax candles to the desk around the tools. This casted light over his blood stained tools.

We needed something to cover the floor in our set so we took some carpeting from the theatre department in school and borrowed some fake blood to cover the tools and rags, we had brought some cloth for tearing from a member of our groups home,

When the actors arrived we briefed them on what we required that day. Alabama Jackson aged 12 and Berika Mindeli aged 18. Amy, one of my group members took Alabama to change into the dress we wanted and put some white makeup on to make it seem as if she had been there for a while and was tired from struggling, the dress was white to show her innocence as this is shown in many other horror movies like the sixth sense. Berika was made to looked clean and respectable as we wanted him this way to show that he was not a maniac but a calm and calculated murderer/paedophile and so that he looked like an average man.

When we shot the sequence we diverted from the storyboards at parts so that we had more material to work with when editing. We did experimental shots like focus pulls. This has helped with the editing process as we are using the focus pull and other shots that were not in the storyboard. These shots as well as the shots from the storyboard helped to create tension and conform to the thriller/horror genre.

We weren’t quite sure if our female actor could make it because she may not have been let out of school. We only found this out on the morning of the shoot day, we spoke to her father Ted Jackson again and he said that he would try and get her. We asked another girl to play the part in case Alabama Jackson didn’t turn up. She accepted but in the end Alabama arrived and we used her.

For lighting we used artificial moonlight coming through holes in our boarded up window. We used candles and a light bulb dangling from the ceiling. We also used studio lights which we controlled from the lighting board when we needed extra light in a scene.

We kept our actors in complete silence until the scream, this helped create tension and then shock our audience with a loud noise, this is typical of a thriller or horror movie as they build tension through jumpy actions.

Our shoot day went very well, as we had enough footage time. We had doubts about how easy it would be to work with Alabama but she turned out to work very well and listen to what we said.