The shooting day

On the shooting day we first of all had a brief discussion about what we wanted to do in our sequence and made a few changes in order to make it shorter and more peaceful instead of the hectic escape-suicide we had originally planned. We wanted to film a man throwing down paper (representing banknotes) to make the audience think he was a banker, effected by the present economy. The beginning would be all about the freedom of letting things go and only at the end we would reveal how high he actually was and that he was actually commiting suicide because he was mentally insane. To let the audience know this I made a sign saying 'pineview home for the mentally ill' and we stuck it to the wall and filmed it and planned to place it at the end of our sequence.
After the final discussion deciding exactly what we wanted to do and telling that to the actors; we went to the bottom of the theatre where we started filming a hero shot of James throwing the paper whilst tracking around. Within the tracking shots we did a close up and a mid-shot and we made him stand on a table in order for him to jump off so we could later use that and cut to the dummy falling. We also filmed James jumping over the camera which worked quite well because the illusion that he was jumping to commit suicide looked more realistic. Because of the high angle we used for these shots, the illusion that James was very high up worked well.
After the hero shots we got James to stand at the top of the theatre and throw the paper down from the top. Here we got some really good tracking shots of the paper against blue sky. We also did a wide shot of the building with James standing on top of it which we wanted to use near the end of the sequence where we revealed how high up the man was.
We then took the camera equiptment up to the top of the building, got James to stand on a table (this might be a good time to add that the location was perfectly safe because although shooting from the bottom looked like James was standing on the roof of a tall building, the top of the building is actually a grassy area with the school car park next to it) and we did a silhouette shot of James from behind, capturing the view of the vally bellow.
After the silhouette shot we then had the most fun part of the day: throwing Billy the dummy off the building. We shot this several times with the camera in different positions; shooting with a wideshot including the building , shooting from the side of the dummy with a high angle and finally shooting from behind the dummy falling. We also experimented with the way we threw Billy and found that the best way was to have three people supporting the weight and push him, this looked more like a jump because the dummy travelled further away from the building and landed evenly instead of on its side.
Finnally we shot James lying dead on the ground with fake blood coming out of his mouth and tracked round to the sign saying mental hospital with onlookers in the background. We had then finnished filming and packed up the equiptment and props.