Final Doc shoot

Our final shoot was this Tuesday and we had 3 locations to cover so it was bound to be a tiring shoot. The weather was awful but as pressed for time as we are and as we are filming in winter we took what we were given, at least it didn't rain heavily.

We started in the church as it doesn't have a roof and it wasn't yet raining. There were two specific shots I wanted from this location and we managed to get both. First a long shot from the stairs (that and at the top step to the second floor which no longer exit!) of the guys walking across the precarious floorboards. Secondly there is some really cool apocalyptic churchy graffiti in a small square room, I wasn't sure how to shoot this and after a little practice managed to get a 360 pan of the room with one of the urbexers walking round. I went through the floor a few times whilst filming and ripped my jacket on the way in but apart from that the first location went pretty well, the light levels were better than we expect and we got quite a lot of footage.

The second location was a little tricky to get into, on our reccie only me and the urbexer got in, this time we gor our lighting woman through but whilst our director was outside someone approached us in a car and questioned him. The negativity of the guy worried our director so we decided to move on and cut out the location. We still had to get all the kit out which would take 5-10mins so I quickly grabbed as much footage as possible with the urbexers. Fortunately this location wasn't going to have a lot of screen time anyway and I knew the one shot I had to get, an out of focus shot of them on the bottom floor from a broken window on the second. It was however all hand held, hopefully I wasn't too shakey and some of it can be smoothed out in post but we should be able to get maybe 30secs to 1min of footage from the rushes. It was only going to have 1min tops anyway so thats not too bad, just a shame the shoot got a little usurped by a nosy bystander.
This is me setting the shot through the window

The third location was my least favourite but we had a lot of time to spend there after location two was cut down. I got a nice repetition of a stanley tools shot of a long room with one urbexer knelt in the foreground on the right and the other stood in the background on the left. I also got a really nice shot of one urbexer walking down a corridor and knocking the loose paint off the wall, this looked really nice and has the kind of motion and imagery that fits the doc perfectly. Steve (director) had a lot of shots he wanted to get from the location, it inspired him a lot, so I left him to work whilst I got some basic coverage as I couldnt see that much good in the location. This is one of the shots an urbexer got, we are hoping to use this pic and others in our final piece. The colour, contrast and focus of this pic are awesome!

So oveerall a mixed day but the footage has been pro res's and looked through and nobody thinks we need to do any more shooting so I guess THATS A WRAP!