Equipment and Props Used
Last year's project was fairly barebones for my group, we didn't have a lot of money in which to buy other equipment and so we stuck purely to the camera our school gave us. This time around, we intended on buying a lot more specialist equipment to improve our film vastly. Of course we still tried to make use of the school camera and tripod provided so that we had a good start but we expanded on it a bit more this time around. Eventually though, we ended up ditching the school camera in preference of better equipment. The following is the equipment we used and why:
#1 DSLR Camera (Equipment)
Seeing as we abandoned the school camera, we had to come up with an alternative solution. A girl in our class mentioned that last year she used a DSLR camera and recommended we do it this year if we wanted to up our quality. So, we jumped on Amazon and looked at getting ourselves one, it came next day and we began filming straight away. The quality difference really was astounding especially for the sideline shots of our car chase. There were a lot more features on the camera for this time round too, namely the zoom and focusing were a massive help. It was also useful for us to have an automatic white balance feature; it meant that we didn't have to carry around a white piece of card with us all filming days like we had to with the school camera.
#2 Tripod (Equipment)
Last year we were lumbered with school equipment that didn't particularly provide us with much quality yet gave us a lot of difficulties. The tripod last time was part of it; this time round, luckily, the school were able to provide us with a bit of an upgrade on the old tripod. Fortunately the school managed to find out another one that hadn't been used much beforehand and allowed us to borrow it for filming days. This tripod was able to extend higher and the panning felt a lot more stable this time round.
#3 Trolley (Equipment)
We found a trolley for this year's project which aided us in panning and tracking shots. It was a simple piece of wood connected to wheels and had brakes attached; Luke's step dad had made it a long time ago for a purpose he couldn't even remember and he was fine with allowing us to use it for filming. It was very heavy as well as being incredibly difficult to transport between locations and so we ended up using it a lot less than we first intended. Despite this, we used it for our last scene and tried to implement it in our foot chase as much as possible. It was a cool idea that we tried to incorporate into our film and, whilst it wasn't used as much as we wanted, it was still a useful addition to our equipment.
#4 Green Screen (Equipment)
The main point of focus for our whole film came from the green screen. It was the biggest pain to use as well as being perhaps our most ambitious feature this year so we had to try and get it right. It was very important to use lighting with our green screen without there being glare or anything that might interfere. Disregarding the difficulties, it was a lot of fun to work with really. It only took about 10 minutes to set up each time and we had to use coat hangers to hang it up because the clamps ended up not actually coming with the rest of the stationary necessary for hanging up. We also had to use weights (bricks) to anchor down our green screen so it didn't move all over the place whilst we were in the car filming shots. As you can tell, it was far from a professional standard but, then, we are merely students so perhaps that's to be expected. We tried to make the most of what we had to work with and I'd say it went well considering we didn't have the full set of necessary equipment to use the green screen to it's full potential.
#5 Villain's Car/The Audi (Prop)
For our film, we needed two vehicles, one for the antagonist/"villain" and one for the protagonist/"hero". The car for the villain, though, needed to be a lot more powerful and sleek looking considering it was supposed to be belonging to a mobster-type guy. Luke's step dad had an Audi that was basically perfect for the role and his step dad was happy with driving it for our car chase scene so we made use of it for the time it was available. It really was powerful and fun to be inside whilst we filmed interior shots.
#6 Hero's Car/The Astra (Prop)
The other car we needed had to be of a lesser quality and wasn't necessarily required to be a fast or powerful car. Fortunately for us, there's an abundance of low quality "first cars" at a sixth form school! Among these was Jordan's Toyota Aygo and our friend's Mini but we decided that there was probably a limit to how bad the car could be and how novel it could look. In the end we went with one of our friend's cars (Vauxhall Astra). The point with this car was that it looked at least half decent, wasn't too slow and we could re-shoot interior footage with my mum's car if we needed to because she also had an Astra... spoiler alert: we ended up needing to do just that!
#7 Another Astra for Interior Shots (Prop)
As we got further along with our filming schedule, we noticed it would be more and more difficult to get hold of the Astra being used in the film for other shoots. This was because it's owner (a friend named James) was usually very busy with either his own schoolwork or extra-curricular work and so we'd need to use a different Astra for the interior shots. The reason it had to be an Astra was so the continuity remained consistent with the logo on the steering wheel of interior shots. Luckily my mother has an Astra and was free after school every day so we could use my Grandad's garage and set up the green screen with my mum's Astra and film whenever we wanted.
#8 Bag (Prop)
The bag was obviously a massive part of the story because it is essentially what the story revolves around. We had to make sure we had a bag that was deep enough to store items of some kind (money in this case more than likely) as well as being easy to carry whilst running and plain enough to look like it could really be used to hide or smuggle something. My half-broken school bag was an option but then I remembered I had a new and identical bag at home (waiting for me in case my actual school bag broke properly). Naturally, this seemed to be our best option and, so, I suggested it and we went forward with it. As you can see, it's got no major logos on to ruin the image of the bag, it's plain enough to seem like you could hide something in it without attracting too much attention and its handles are perfect for easy carrying whilst running and throwing.
#9 Poker Set + Table/Chairs (Prop)
The Poker idea came to us fairly late on in the brainstorming session when we came to thinking of our plot but it quickly became quite an important part of our story. It's commonly a good technique films use to build tension and we decided we needed that to kick start our film off instead of erupting into action for the full 5 minutes. Not only this but we thought it'd be a good way to show that we were dealing with a foreign group of people without having to incorporate pointless and tedious exposition later on in the film. Fortunately David, our main actor, had a spare poker set lying around that we could borrow and it ended up being fairly pivotal to our opening.
