Before we filmed we wrote out what we needed done, what time was required and when best to do it. Due to our tight schedule we pushed to film the majority of our narrative in the one night. Filming commenced around 8pm but soon we encountered a prop problem of finding a suitable liquid to serve as blood. Ultimately we went with red food colouring as our 'blood' and it worked out well enough.
In regards to the falling over shot we decided to change the shot from something like this:
1:12-1:16
to more of a slower collapse where our character drops to their knees then drops in front of our husband character.
- Danny
After extinguishing the fire, we wanted to film the torches scenes straight away as the police stumble across the fire just shortly as it was extinguished. To film this two members of our group climbed up a hill to reach a point just overlooking the spot in which our protagonist was resting. Here we filmed several takes of the lights discovering the spot so that we got the right angle, lighting and effects. After this lighting scene we moved onto the scene where the torches are almost on our main character. We had to film this several times to make sure we knew the exact moment the torches would land on our character, as well as how far he would run before getting caught. All in all, filming the torch scenes went very well and we are extremely pleased with the footage we attained.
After the torch scenes we set out immediately to film the running scenes. These scenes took the longest to film, and were also the most difficult. Due to filming in the dark we had problems with lighting, so we decided to use the torches as lighting. The running scenes were set in different locations so we had to figure out where would be the best position to film so that we could create a fluid panning shot for both clips without the scenes jumping.
After all the running/chase scenes were filmed we only had the suicide scene to film for that night, and after a solid 5 hours of filming, we were all extremely tired, yet dedicated to filming this scene perfectly. After a slight hike up a rather steep hill we finally found a spot that Danny could fall from in which it looked like he was jumping, when in reality he was falling onto the slope of the hill. Before we filmed it we had to clear out the area Danny would fall onto so that he wasn't injured. Then we walked back up the hill and filmed Danny running to that spot from a wide shot, mid shot, and different angles so that we were sure we found the perfect clip. Due to it being very dark we once more had to use the torches for light, but we worked them in with the narrative by making the conscious decision of having Danny get caught.
Unfortunately we couldn't film the Heaven scenes in the same day and due to the typical Irish weather being rain, it was a short while until we could film on a sunny day. When we finally filmed the Heaven scene it went smoother than we imagined and didn't take very long. We shot the scenes from a wide variety of angles and used many different shots using handheld and steady cam.
-Ceára
