Difficulties
Over this project, my group faced a series of problems. Amongst these were casting issues, struggles to find suitable locations, problems with getting cars available at certain times and a whole host of others below that I will endeavour to describe to you!
Casting Issues
The main problem we faced really was the initial casting. Being in an all boys school, it is often a struggle to find boys confident enough or apathetic enough to want to feature in a short film that other people may see. A few different people we had in mind refused because they either didn't have any free time available to work with us or they didn't actually end up fitting our idea of what our characters should look like.
None of the three of us (Jordan, Luke or I) particularly wanted to act in our film this time around but we were willing to force ourselves if we couldn't find any other viable participants. Luke fortunately ended up fitting the model of what our antagonist should look like and he was open to acting once Jordan and I persuaded him! The casting was a big initial problem but once we got round to mobilising and filming, we realised our casting decisions were actually probably the best we could have had really!
Location Issues
The locations this time around (for my group especially) had to be more varied. Last year, in our AS project, we really weren't particularly adventurous, opting for singular rooms and easy places to film. This time around, we really wanted to diversify the locations and challenge ourselves which we certainly did! We really needed to find a quiet set of roads with which we could set up our cameras in order to shoot our car chase. It was very difficult to find a set of roads that weren't incredibly busy, too narrow or had too many pedestrians around. Eventually, though, we found an area near a school in Lytchett that wasn't too busy in terms of cars or civilians walking dogs or walking solo and we managed to set up cameras along the road (and do a few takes of a chase without attracting unwanted attention!).
Regardless of car scenes, it was also very difficult to find ideal locations to shoot foot chases too. Initially our story dictated us having an alleyway with a doorway in it that allowed our story to burst out straight into the action. We quickly realised that perhaps a lot of films that featured this trope were American as we struggled (an awful lot) to find any alleys like this besides my own personal garden gate and an alley in Tower Park (both of which were far too narrow sadly). We ended up having to ditch the concept of getting an alleyway like this and had to settle for other locations instead.
The last location issue we had was really finding good areas with which we could set up the green screen but I'll go into that detail below.
Green Screen Issues
Straight from the off, we knew that the green screen was the most ambitious part of our project. The car chase could be done with relative ease by comparison once we had a location nailed down. The green screen, on the other hand, would be very difficult to do to a decent standard. Being a Media student, I have of course seen a lot of films which means that I have, of course, seen a lot of poor CGI and green screening; this meant that I was determined to ensure my group managed to pull this off to a level that we could be happy with considering the budget and equipment we had at our disposal.
We began with thinking that we could manage it in open air. That didn't go well. We didn't really account for the glare from the sun and the shine that came off various materials inside the cars and so, whilst our shots were decent inside the cars, the glare/shine ended up ruining our scene. Basically the glare would register as part of the green screen and so parts of the steering wheel and windows would end up becoming transparent. We wasted a lot of time filming various scenes inside of the cars before we realised this, much to our frustration. Once we realised what the problem was, however, we relocated to garages and dark closed areas and used light on the green screen to a much better effect. This wasn't only better because of the lighting, though, because we also found the elements to be highly troubling when filming outside (for obvious reasons). The wind made it very hard for us to keep the screen steady and, as the sun moved through the day, shadows would leap across the screen, making the editing nigh-on impossible.
Once we moved inside, most of these problems went away but we still had to rely on steady lighting which took us a few different attempts.
Vehicle Issues
Using vehicles for anything in life usually creates various difficulties and this was certainly no different! Not only was it incredibly hard to get two cars available at the same time as my group and our actors were but it was even harder to make sure the drivers/owners of the cars didn't get irritated awaiting our finishing of scenes. Luckily, the filming of the car chase ended up being a lot of fun for the drivers and so I believe that made it at least a little bit worth their time and petrol!
Unfortunately, neither of our actors could actually drive and, so, we had to make sure we didn't catch the drivers of the cars in any of the shots in which we had the cars moving. This was easily done after a few attempts but it started off being a real concern for the group