Location for Establishing Shot

Initially, for the opening scenes of our trailer, we thought that a dark, low key lit garage was ideal. A garage would provide a 'homely' feel to our scene, where the character speaksdirectly to a video camera, stating a monolgue for audiences to listen and watch. The use of candles in the garage were used to provide a religious and eerie element. The idea of subtle lighting, casting shadows on the mask appealed to us. We did not want to use generic light from a lightbulb as this provided a white light, which contrasted too much with the conventions of our film trailer (dark, dismal, religious, low key lit scenes).

We decided to place our character up against the wall of the garage and side on to a mounted shelf. The shelf provided a base to stand the tea light candles on, and the background was covered in relevent news articles, displaying death, anger and religion.

When we started filming the scene, we realised that lighting was a major issue. The tea lights provided a warm glow to parts of the mask, however the light source was too dim to reach the whole of the face. Torches were then tested to provide extra light, however the brightness and colour of the light was too bright and white. By using candles we had to be cautious of the hessian mask not being too close to the flame, otherwise it would ignite.

We chose around 4 different areas of the garage to shoot from, changing the level at which the character was standing, and where the candle light sources were placed.

When we had finished filming and uploaded the footage onto the Mac, it was clear that the candles did not provide enough light in any of the shots, and the garage location was too dark.

From evaluating our footage, we decided to change the location of our opening scene and the light sources that we used. 

Collectively, a home basement was decided upon to re-film our establishing shot. The natural lighting in the basement provided enough dimlit light to illumintate the characters face, whilst still keeping with the conventions of a low key lit location.

The mise en scene was altered significantly, as well as the camera angle from being diagonal to the character to face on. The basement location still kept with the home-like feel and the footage like a home video.

After uploading our footage onto the Mac, we were happy with our own perceptions of the footage and this was reiterated by positive peer-review feedback.

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