Planning the Edale Shoot

Once we had been given our briefs, I paired up with Grace Walker and we set about brainstorming ideas for our short film. We wanted to concentrate on a character within the film, rather than just film shots of the countryside for 3 minutes, which we didn't think would be very engaging.
Our initial idea was following the life of a character who had rejected the materialistic elements of life and attempted to go back to living amongst nature. We wanted to make use of flashbacks to city locations to make this clearer to the viewer. We decided to mask the character's face as a memorable element, and as a metaphor for hiding from society, so spent some time creating a simple costume for the character using our excellent arts and crafts skills.


The next thing to do was set about planning the shots we were going to collect. We decided we couldn't really afford to go and scope the location out, so we created a draft storyboard which had room for change, in case we were unable to film the exact shots we wanted.


At the last minute Ruby Harman was added to our group, so there was a lot of last-minute scrambling, trying to get everyone in the right place to work on things. This wasn't helped by the fact we had only a week to prepare for the shoot, from start to finish! We were on the ball when booking equipment though; as we went to book it so early, we were some of the few students who managed to secure PD170s, and were even able to pick them up the day before rather than on the morning of the trip.

Overall everything felt very last-minute; both Ruby and Grace were pretty busy in the days leading up to the shoot, and despite multiple attempts to get them both in the same place at the same time, it never happened. I felt pretty unprepared for the shoot, and wish we'd had more time to collaborate properly on the project: I feel it definitely impacted negatively on the quality of our final film.