On 12th December 2016, we shot the rest of our vampire film. This time we filmed at a friend’s house in Cathays, we chose his house as it didn’t look massively like a student house, it was rather homey and old and we thought it looked like a grandmother’s house.
We took out the same equipment as our first shoot (Sony FS5, tripod, LED light, reflector, track and clapperboard) and took our actress, Laura Maggs, to our location to start filming.
We started off filming around 5pm as we needed it to be dark outside, we firstly filmed our main character, Red, arriving at her grandmother’s house and searching around for her. We’d set around an hour and a half to film this however, it took no more than half an hour to film. This meant we were able to do a couple of run throughs with our actress so she knew exactly what to do and where to stand in each scene and was confident in all of her actions.
Our second actress, Linda, then arrived. Linda was an actress we had found on Starnow and so we were quite nervous to meet her and work with her for the first time, as we weren’t sure what type of person she’d be. But Linda was absolutely lovely, she was so helpful with our filming, as she had experience of acting in other productions she questioned a few of our lines and scenes which really helped our film and made it a lot easier to film on the day. Linda and Laura worked really well together and I think that gave us all a bit of confidence in our film.
We filmed with both of our actresses for around 3/4 hours and we got more than enough footage for our short film. We thanked Linda and reimbursed her for her travel expenses, keeping her email for next time and she was lovely.
The shoot went really well and I think we got plenty of shots and takes of each scene, however I feel our fight scene could’ve been choreographed better. When it came to filming that scene we realised that we hadn’t really practiced how we wanted the fight to go, and as Linda was slightly elderly we obviously didn’t want to hurt her or our other actress in any way. We eventually came up with a way of fighting which would end up with Linda falling on the sofa so not to injure herself. I feel that if we were to film again we would definitely need more planning for the fight scene and think it over a bit better.
We also attempted to use fake blood and fangs in our film, however the fake blood stained our actresses hand’s red! This meant we had to rethink a few of our scenes as her hands couldn’t be bright red in them! We also attempted to use fake fangs and they worked for a few scenes, but they kept falling out and becoming loose. If we filmed again I would definitely buy some more expensive fake blood and fangs so that they look realistic and don’t ruin parts of our film!
Here are some BTS pictures from our second shoot day:
REDEMPTION 