Auroras Peak - Shoot 2 - Breathe Studios

Breathe Studios -

For this shoot, there was a little bit of an issue from the very beginning. There was apparently no booking made for the time we selected to shoot out film (eeek!).

Klara had arranged this over Easter so I’m not what happened, or why the venue didn’t have our booking. Luckily, we were able to talk him round into letting us using the space there and then as we had documents he had signed with the specific time and date on.

After we managed to sort this out, we were a little behind schedule so we got started on filming straight away. We were super tight on time and this meant we really had to work together to get this done.
We started moving quicker through the shots and took it in turns to capture different movements.

This worked pretty well and even though things were a little rushed, we got all the necessary movements to make sure our film made sense.

Auroras Peak - Shoot 1 - Crooksbury Common

Crooksbury Common – Day 1

So, for the first day, our location was Crooksbury Common. For this shoot, we all met at Klaras house at 9:00am sharp. Here we all sorted out the equipment we were going to use and prepped to load up the car. We had a pretty tight schedule as far as shots we needed to get and we only had the glide cam available to us for a couple of days, so the fact that the weather wasn’t great was… not so great.
To start with, half our group (including myself) was driven to Crooksbury Common and we set up base there.

We had to do two trips as Lawrence was driving us there and back. Klara, Andre, Karina and myself arrived first and set up base by the woods. Unfortunately, living in England we of course weren’t lucky with the weather and the heavens opened up. I managed to make a makeshift tent to keep the equipment and us mostly dry which kept our spirits up as we waited for the others.

Once we all arrived, we headed to our first location, which was on top of the hill, right in the center of Crooksbury Common. Klara and myself worked closely together, setting up the shots we needed and took turns on capturing the shots needed. We began filming but quickly things started to not run as smoothly. Because the weather conditions were so extreme, we had to take many precautions keeping ourselves dry but most importantly the equipment, which started to fail. We were completely frozen and soaked by the end of the shoot, which was really tough for us all.
This also meant we had to make a judgment call to skip some of the shots because the weather was just too extreme. We mutually decided that we could make this up with other shots from different scene and montage them together to keep the storyline going.

Auroras Peak - Rehearsal

Test Shoot –

To get a rough idea of what we were up against on the filming side, our set up a test shoot in Breathe Studios with our new dancer to become familiar with her style and get used to working with her before the official shooting days.

For this, I had to make sure all my equipment was ready and set up for this as we were relying on my resources to film.

This gave Phoebe a chance to work more closely with Karina on the chorography and this gave me the opportunity to get test shots to give us an idea of what thew footage would come out like on the official shoot. I really enjoyed testing out different styles of filming, because I was filming a dance piece, I had to keep in my of various movements and how to keep the camera stable and steady.

For this, I decided to use my portable crane as a makeshift rig. This allowed me to pull focus and move smoothly, keeping up with Karinas movements and this came out very well on footage.

Auroras Peak - Props

My group discussed with me how they wanted specific dance memorabilia to be shown on the shoot, as we needed the scene to look realistic. Luckily, I have a dance/theater background so I thought of using some of my old dance certificates and medals to decorate the scene.
We had to be careful when filming as they all have my name printed on them so we managed to position the camera in specific angles to hide my name.

This worked really well for the bedroom scene and gave a more personal touch to the characters bedroom and shows an insight into the characters past.

  

                              

Auroras Peak - Roles

Job Roles –

Andre: Writer, Co-Director

Klara: Producer, Camera Operation

Phoebe: Director of Choreography

Amy: Costume, Camera Operation

Jonny: Cinematography

Lawrence: Editor

In this project, we had real confusion over what roles we each were going to do. I think everyone has changed or gained at least one role, which has been a little confusing. The list above is what we as a group decided to settle for, and this has worked for the rest of the shoot.