Shoot Day Reflection

Shoot day was on thw 21st January 2017, upon reaching the media block it was concluded by everyone involved that our thriller idea needed to change but nobody was sure exactly what to. My group and I and also Matt were keen on the sniper story originally, however one of our actors (Ezra) could not make it to the shoot so we were left with only Mike which we found out the day previous. On shoot-day we had a look through the costume bag and decided to see what there was, there was a blue prison like jumpsuit a pair of large trousers, a large green jacket and a camo jacket with a pair of boots. We used these items of clothing to re-think the idea as quickly as possible. One of the boys in my media class (Vova) voulenteered to be our second actor.

We began to think of sniper movies that we knew, movies such as: American Sniper, Jack Reacher and Leon, and tried to decide if there were any ideas we could grab from something we have seen before. I have always thought that Leon is an intriguing film with an amazing plot. We had a discussion and took away the idea of having a young protegee and turned it into a recruitment. We decided the plot would follow this:

A highly trained sniper takes the decision that he wants somebody to work with so he can kill more people faster, a young boy is taken out with the sniper to have a trial and see if he can do the job. He will then be faced with the task of killing a civillian but hesitates to go through with it. After the job is done they flea the scene, a short conversation takes place between the two men and in a shock plot twist the sniper shoots his recruit for hesitating, and we will end it there on a cliff-hanger.

We took the mini bus to our inital location for our other thriller (Cornhill) and began to set up close to the woods to make the location look as secrative and rural as posssible. We did many different angles and things when shooting each part of the thriller we used, mid-shot, wide shot, close up and hand held. We used a micro-phone that we hand held and pointed at the source of the noise to make it audible and to drown out any unwanted background noise. We made sure we had plenty of shots on every little scene we did and in the end had an amazing selection of footage.

Although our idea changed on the day we still used our shoot schedule to give ourselves a rough idea of how to handle this thriller and it went really well. The whole morning ran completely smoothly and we are really pleased with what we did and we are now ready for editing!