Step by Step Account of the (Second) Shoot Day

We left school around 9:00 in the morning and travelled over to Ewhurst turrets, a boarding house of Hurtwood, and set up the cameras in the living room of the house. We wanted the scene to be set at night and we were filming in the morning, which was obviously going to be a slight problem, so we brought bin bags along with us to tape to the windows to block out any day light, and pulled the curtains across to make it less obvious it was bin bags. This ended up working very effectively as it is very dark in our footage. 

Then we moved the furniture around to fit the image of the living room that we had in our heads and put it onto the camera. We had Hugo, our actor, sit in a very relaxed position on the sofa opposite the TV because it makes the footage look more natural and realistic. 

We then needed to get the footage of the actual ghost show that we filmed on the first shoot day to play on the TV so Hugo looked like he was actually watching it and so he had something to react to. We did this by plugging in a USB to the laptop with the footage on it and then air playing it onto the TV. We then put a Lightbox on top of the TV to add more light onto Hugo's face so we could see him in the footage, and Nehir moved her hand in front of it to make it look like it was the light from the TV. We changed the colour of the light to green when the footage of the night vision on the TV show started playing, to make it look more realistic and reinforce that it was the light from the TV.

Albie was the camera man for most of the day, I was on sound, Nehir was on light, and Flora was helping direct at most bits. We took a wide shot, mid shot and extreme close up of the actor watching the TV show all the way through so we could cut to the TV going static whenever we felt like it was necessary to do so when editing it later on. We then took an over the shoulder wide shot of Hugo watching the TV so we could actually see the TV show, and then we kept the camera in the same position and did a close up on the TV so the audience can see the TV show being played so they can react the same way to the actor. 

Once we did that we then decided how we were going to visualise the scare that we wanted. We used Tom, another actor, and we decided that he should walk in from where Hugo got up to walk over to the TV to work out what was wrong with it in the sequence, so that it would be very creepy for the audience to watch, and wonder how he got there. We did a close up of Hugo from behind and had Tom walk in front of the camera holding a big, sharp knife, and made sure the knife was directly in sight of the camera and di a focus pull from Hugo to the knife once it was in shot. I went on camera for this part and Flora was on sound.

Before we finished, we decided to get a shot from behind the TV, so we could show that there was no-one behind Hugo when he got up to fix the TV, further adding the ambiguity and a better scare, and leaving the audience wondering "how did he get there?" We needed to stack a couple of cases on top of each other in order to put the camera on it so we could see Hugo over the TV, because the tripod would not fit on the table so we needed to make a makeshift one.

We then decided we had all the footage we need, Albie shouted "that's a wrap" and we packed up all the things, put them back in the minibus and headed back to the school.