Shooting: Making Ged Disappear and the Corridor Location Shot

We had to film, the sequence of Ged disappearing on two occasion. A relatively simple shot in principle, in practical it was a lot more complicated. The idea was for the camera to be in a dolly movement along the back of the lecture theatre. As the camera goes behind one of the heads of the students, Ged would quickly duck down and when the camera came from behind the student's head he would have disappeared.

 

 

This was very difficult in practice. Due to the fact that firstly- we do not have a dolly. So we overcame this decision with the idea of placing the camera onto some fabric (a hoodie usually) and then dragging the hoodie along one of the continuous back desks in the Lecture Theatre. Once we had solved this, another difficulty arose. Without a monitor for the camera, Ged could not see when to duck down out of the way. We resolved the issue by having Clare (who plays Selene) to give Ged a signal to duck.

 

We had to borrow classes of people to use in the lecture theatre and selected seats so the room looked as full as possible. We included Lizzie and Daniel (who play Michael and Eve) so the eagle-eyed audience member could see this was their teacher who disappeared.

 

Then, we had to find the right speed of the camera movement and perfect the timings for Ged to duck down. We re-arranged the formation of students in order to find a way to conceal Ged but the first day of shooting left us with no usable footage. So, we tried again another day and eventually we finally succeeded and gained a shot we could use.

 

The same day we decided to get a shot of an empty corridor. We chose the corridor because of the clinical quality of it- it could look like part of a hospital. Also, we knew the corridor was rarely used. We got a number of shots both zooming in and zooming out as well as fixed camera shots. We would decide which to use when editing.