Signed artist agreements

Below are the signed artist agreements (addresses have been deleted):

Declan's agreement (Shaun)

Declan's agreement (Shaun)

Meriel's agreement (Mum)

Meriel's agreement (Mum)

Sid's agreement (Step-Dad)

Sid's agreement (Dad)

Filming-25/11/14

We scheduled in a night shoot for the 25th of November to shoot the scene with mum and dad, the bedroom scene where Declan is researching the charity shop and the beginning of the fight scene.

Call sheet for Tuesday's shoot

We planned out the shoot as followed:

6:30pm
Page 4 of script
Living room scene
Characters present mum, dad and Shaun

8:30pm
Page 5 of script
Bedroom scene
Characters present Shaun

9:30pm
Page 5 of script
Opening of fight scene

Fight Club and Pursuit of Happyness

A film that brought on inspiration for this piece was the film Fight Club directed by David Fincher.

'Jack' has a mundane boring life that consists of the same things of going to work and going home with no change or difference until he starts going to self help groups and finally creating his own through his alter ego Tyler Durden.

The idea of a man living a boring stereotypical work life was inspiration for our character Shaun who lives a lifestyle of going to work in a call centre then going home to watch the TV. This is until he finds a homeless man he walks past everyday collapsed. This similar epiphany of wanting to change things happens to Shaun that 'Jack' also feels.

Similar work setting 

While 'Jack' uses violence to get our of his everyday routine we wanted our character to have a less violent change. Instead Shaun is going to volunteer at a local charity preferably a shelter charity that helps the homeless to find places to sleep over night.

Another influence is the Pursuit of Happyness which is the story of a man and his young son who are made homeless. Chris Gardener is made homeless after losing the family money through a bad investment deal meaning him and his son are left to live on the street. They are helped however from a church that offers shelter to the homeless. We wanted to capture this idea of how it is hard for the homeless living on the street but that help is available too. Our character Shaun is going to volunteer at a charity shop that helps people in similar situations to get over the guilt he is feeling about not offering the homeless man money.

Chris and his son sleeping in the train station

First draft of 5-10 minute script

Notes from Drama Meeting- 18th November

As our actor had suddenly become unavailable and was no longer answering our calls we had to re-cast our main character of Shaun. We are now using Declan who also auditioned for the part but was unable to take it at the time due to being away. His auditions can be seen in the compilation video below as seen on the other blog post on auditions. He is the blonde actor.

I have created a timetable of everyone's availability to work so that I can construct a shooting schedule of the coming weeks:

From the timetable it seems the best available days are Wednesday and Thursday for everyone so I have highlighted them in the shooting diary and asked the group if it was okay to schedule for these days.

The aim is to have the piece shot over the next two weeks as this gives enough time for post production work.

Another side point is that TS will take over recording sound from now on as Tyrese is unavailable due to work. Tyrese however will carry on editing.

Two minute piece shoot

Day 1

The filming today took place in Tom's house and went occurring to plan. We set up the location by covering the windows to make it seem as if it was at night as written in the script by using black bin bags taped over the windows. As the scene was about Shaun watching TV we used a LED small panel light and blue gel that flickered onto a reflector onto James' face to make it look like he was watching TV.

However after looking at the footage in the edit suite afterwards it was too dark even when we edited it to be lighter in post production meaning we decided to reshoot the scene.

We also decided to cut out the aspect of Shaun smoking an e-cigarette as it made the actor James come off as uncomfortable on the screen.

Day 2

Instead of shooting the underpass scene like we originally planned we decided to do the reshoot of the TV scene at Tom's. After we took down some of the black bags and added a light to the scene we created a brighter looking scene that helped to capture the scene we wanted.

Day 3

We rescheduled the underpass shoot for today before the lunchtime rush that goes through the underpass however it was still pretty busy. We had to use Emily's friend Jack as the homeless man but I thought this worked effectively because they were the same age putting them on a similar level.

Day 4

Our final shoot took place in a teaching room in the library which we wanted to use as a call centre. Danayet and Tyrese tok on the roles of Shaun's coworkers as we wanted to make the place seem very busy and show how cut off her was from everyone. 

Some of the shots for this section didn't go as well as we had planned as we couldn't get all the angles we wanted due to not having enough extras that would fill the scene behind all the shots.

Call Sheets 2 and 3

We decided that we needed to re-shoot some of the living room and underpass scenes after seeing the rushes from day 1. We scheduled this for the 5th of November:

We finalised the 2 minute piece by filming the call centre scene where Shaun is at work on the 10th of November: