Account of Shot Day

So much planning went into the day before our shoot day! I honestly got a little anxious, just to be ready to not mess it up and get everything we needed. Lots of changes have came up through our project so it got stressful, but I suppose it was all down to creative decisions. This phone call, the day before stressed us out, as you can see on my face, the guys at the shop acted clueless to us coming, but finally the manager confirmed it, THANK YOU! We were scheduled at their most quiet hours during the day not to disturb their customers.

We had to make sure our lead actress was completely free to be in our project. We informed all her teachers that she would not be there because of her participation. All teachers said she was free to continue, this was to our relief.

The morning involved getting everything loaded in the mini van, with the help of some men considering we were a group of three girls, although we could have handled it. 

Reigate where the DIY store is, was around 30 minutes away from our campus. We drove in the mini van. When we drove up right outside we had to get our actress ready. Phoebe and I made sure that Flora (actress) was ready for shooting. We went for the typical housewife look, a bun hair style, simple classic makeup. The outfit was simply a flower patterned velvet shirt, black leggings and pointed heels. 

While we got her prepped, Imogen went in to scout our location once again to check everything perfect.  

Everything by this time seemed to go as planned. Going into the location we went up stairs to look around where we could film. Then we came to a conclusion. Everything in the shop was more home utilities and ornaments than a full DIY super store. This locked us on idea, to approach our character coming into the shop to look for the ordinary things that house wife would love, oven mits, candles and mugs with quotes. We thought if we showed her acknowledging all of these things then the audience would think of a house wife just shopping. Then through out we would show little signs and clues that she was not just any ordinary loving wife caring for her home. These subtle signs included mug that we shot her looking at that had "The best man for the job is a women". This was perfect for our idea and got us a little excited about shooting it because it was slightly intelligent, we kind of all thought we were Stanley Kubrick for a second. 

So to change mood we shot her going into this small room in the shop that was just full of heavy tools such as an axe, shovel and a sledge hammer. By shooting her in there after her walking around looking at domestic shopping we just knew that her in this room would change the dynamic in the final product.

At the end we shot her picking up bin bags and bleach, all the things to cover up a murder. Finally when we thought we were done we caught our eyes on a large CCTV television in the corner of the shop. This was in fact our last spontaneous decision of the day. We knew that this would look visually interesting. We got our actress to walk around the shop again to we could capture her on the footage.