My Name Is John - Day 2 Shoot

Day 2 of shooting My Name is John wasn't as easy as the first shoot, as the night before shooting we had a huge snow fall, meaning many of the major roads where rather closed or had huge traffic jams. this meant we had to change our original plans as we had arranged for me to go and pick up the crew from hartlepool, but the snow made this impossible, so the crew ended up getting the train down to middlesbrough so i could get them easier. Luckily most of the roads that i needed to use to get to the location of filming where clear. meaning though we arrived slightly later than planed we did arrive at least. the location itself was suppose to be a corner shop, though after our director had some difficulty finding a location we ended up filming at a car sales shop that had a small shop attached to it. This in the bigger picture was probably better as it meant we had more room to work with. Actually filming went very quickly as my director and cinematographer decided to just go with a static two shot, they did try and get a shot that panned between the two actors but we all agreed that it really didn't work.

Recording sound was quite easy again i used a boom pole, and got in a location behind the actual till itself. I did have a problem with the till making noise as every time someone came to get petrol the till would make a beeping noise. Though after a few takes we got one that only had one noise in it. We decided that this was going to be the best we could get. I also thought i was going to have a huge problem with music that was coming from the speakers as i was unsure how easy that was going to be to turn off, luckily once we asked the guy behind the till it turned out he controlled the radio meaning he could turn it of there and then. Once we had finished getting this scene i got some atoms from the shop and even recorded some noises of the till operator scanning so i could use them later in the edit. We then headed outside to get two extra shots for this scene. One was very simple and just had John walking towards the shop with the name of the shop in the background for this shot i couldn't really s=record his foot prints without getting into shot, so i waited until we had the shot and then made him do it again so i could record the foot prints. The final shot we needed was of john leaving the shop, again this was an easy shot, and i am very pleased with the audio i managed to record especially saying we where right next to a busy road.

After this shoot we headed back to hartlepool to get the next scene filmed, this was the first and last scene of the film. It was meat to be set in a self help group, but i don't really think we managed to get this across as well as we where hoping for. We had a room for where we wanted to film but after moving some of the furniture around we decided that the room was just two big and was going to look to empty on camera, so we moved into the room next door that was much smaller, i think this helped a lot as it made the scene much more claustrophobic. We where also hoping to get some older actors for the scene, but all we could manage to get was one level 4 and three level 6's one of which was brave enough to do the speaking line in the scene. Sound for this scene was simple i couldn't have the boom that long because of the size of the room, but i personally don't think i really needed it. I did have t lock open a door on the corridor just outside the room however as the microphone was picking up the door every time someone walked through it.