The filming (3 Day period)

After careful scheduling juggling weather, actors availability and equipment availability we were able to start the process of filming.

We were able to film over a total of 3 days the first was at my house and primarily my loft, we had to spontaneously adapt our plans as the place where we had originally planned to film was not available, despite this when designing the story board and shooting script I modelled the film on my own loft and therefore the location was suitable but we had lost some filming time.

As we were filming in a loft the space was restricted so filming with four of us proved difficult we overcame this by moving boxes and creating space. Lighting was another issue as we had little natural light this was overcome with 3 or 4 lamps tactically positioned. The filming itself went smoothly and we had no problems with the equipment or cast, my mum kindly stepped in to play Cynthia.

On our second day of filming, we were on location at the Bickerley bridge in Ringwood, and it was a very sunny and clear day in half term, which meant we had to attempt our shots in the times when the many tourists and dog walkers were absent from the bridge. We had to stop and start a lot to make sure we didn’t get anyone in our shots or pick up their talking on the audio, which would have ruined the continuity of the 1940’s setting. In hindsight, it probably was not the best place for us to film with these complications however the location and imagery of the bridge was too good a prospect to ignore.

Another problem that we faced on  the day was that the battery that we had for the camera was faulty so we had a small amount of time to film before we had to take time out to recharge the battery. On reflection we should have checked the seemingly working equipment.

The biggest problem was due to the fact that our scene involved characters wearing Nazi swastika armbands and this could be misconstrued . Since the bridge is quite near some housing, which must have disturbed one of the residents, causing the police to be called. Once the police had talked to us and seen that we were making a harmless film, they quickly left us to carry on. On reflection we should have notified the residents to make sure there were no misunderstandings however we did do our utmost to be discreet with the armbands hiding them between shots.

As the faulty battery caused us to rush the shots and disrupt up the audio, we decided to come back for a third day, which was overcast and cloudy, which was exactly what we wanted, and it all went smoothly without complications. This time we could film without the disruption of dog walkers as frequently and it was a very clinical day of filming, the actors were very tolerant and were happy to redo scenes lots of time to give us the shots we want. We were able to finish the filming in just over 2 hours and we hope we gave a good selection of shots to later be edited.