Production: shoot day 1 reflection

Today we filmed in Leamington Spa, where we took shots in Jephson Park and in the town centre. The weather was good and so it provided us with the right amount of natural lighting to portray the positive feelings that we were hoping to convey. We had scheduled only one day to film in Leamington Spa as the footage we wanted to capture wasn't a major part of the trailer, and we planned to spend as much time as we needed during the day to capture the right footage.
We had planned to go in half term so that we weren't restricted to specific timings that we had to be back in school by; we made the decision to arrive by 10am so that we were able to make full use of the natural light available, as it would start to get dark at around 4pm.

We had ensure that we had packed two spare batteries for the camera because there would be nowhere for us to charge it as we were working outside all day. This was a useful decision as we had to change the battery twice due to the amount of footage we were capturing. We also decided to use a higher capacity of memory card, exchanging the 8GB for the 16GB to ensure that we had enough space to record enough footage that we could use.
Before the actress arrived at my house, I went to school to discuss the camera settings with my practical media teacher to make sure the exposure settings were right, as this was an issue that we experienced when shooting outside in the first trailer idea that we had. He wrote down the settings that would be best for the scenes we were shooting, and this included the scene setting - "landscape".

As well as making sure that we had enough battery capacity, we also made two copies of the storyboards incase anything happened to the original copy.
While we did meticulously follow the planned shots from the storyboard, we also made the decision to film extra shots so that if the original ones we had planned didn't work out, we would have backup footage.





As we only had permission from Nicole to participate in the film, we tried our hardest to excluded the general public from being in our film; this was easier in Jephson Park as it wasn't so busy, but it was much harder in the town centre as we began filming around lunchtime; this is when many people left work to have lunch. Most people avoided the camera as they didn't want to be filmed, but the few that were in the film won't be the focus of the shot.