West Yorkshire Police Project

Before the new term began a few of us had been offered the opportunity to work on four short crime awareness adverts for the West Yorkshire police. We jumped at the chance and soon we had four short ideas planned and ready to shoot. Over the next post or two I'm going to document the planning that went into each shoot and some reflections regarding what I've learned as a film maker during the process.

Shoot 1. Predicting a burglary.
My Role - Gaffer

The story behind this shoot was that a female student had left her window open and a thief creeps into her house, robs her and then threatens her life. In the heat of the moment the girl wakes up and finds that it was just a bad dream but races downstairs to lock her window.

Its a simple idea and I think the message is quite clear.

Being the first shoot of four it was important that we started strongly and that we as a crew got on and worked together well. I think we did. It was a good all round experience, each of us had a particular role and I think for the majority of the time we really respected that and gave our all to the role. We didn't have any egos getting in the way or huge creative arguments slowing us down.

The problems we did encounter are problems inexperienced film makers like us are bound to come across. Firstly we had some major issues with the lighting. The shoot was set during the evening and all the lights in the house were switched off so we had to give the scenes some extra light to give the set a more dramatic and three dimensional aesthetic.

What we did in one scene was place a 300 lamp outside and directed the light through the front window. On top of the incoming street light the scene looked good. Still there was need of some extra light, so we placed another 300 in the corner of the room, diffused it and bounced the light of a reflector. This killed the harshness of the 300 and just gave the scene a little extra light. This scene worked well.

Unfortunately for us the luck didn't last. Once we began shooting in the bedroom we really struggled to get the scene alive, on camera the whole room looked flat and dark. We tried some different things but every time the light always appeared manufactured and it lacked purpose and place, this really slowed us down. In the end we decided we needed to create moon light coming in from the window. This was hard because the 300's were far to heavy and bright and the room was very small, so what we did was place the 300 just outside the window and created a cardboard cut out to stick on the window. What happened was the light diffused slightly and the room was cast in this really interesting light that appeared to be street light piercing through blinds hanging on the windows. It worked well enough.

The second issue I saw was just a lack of pre filming preparation. This shoot was arguably the hardest one and the crew very much went into it without a strong story board and camera plan. The camera team ended up having to film on the fly and this brought about lots of issues regarding composition and focus.

The shoot itself was long and gave me a good insight into the day to day living of a film maker. We began working at 4 pm and we got to bed on location at 3 am. It was a real test of character and endurance, I learned a lot about my fellow students that night.  

The things I learned that I'm surely going to take into account next time I'm filming is the need for camera plans and strong story boards, that is a must. And secondly whenever I go on a set or location I'll think about placing the light where the light is going be coming from naturally and work from there. Trying to place light in places that would not naturally give light can end up making things more complicated.