Since we started filming, we have found that our pre-production processes such as storyboards, shot lists and scripts are not necessarily concrete. This is most certainly apparent when the filming process actually begins, as the medium of film is a creative art form, this, in turn, affects the actual film and how it is put together.
For us in particular, the actual environments used to film in have limitations in space, lighting and sound. These all have to be taken in to account when filming to avoid mistakes such as continuity errors. Consequently, we have had to change much of our shots and some of our narrative.
We even considered changing some of our locations, but for practicality issues, not because their use wouldn’t have been realistic. Our main change would have been to film the street shots outside Kieran’s house, but due to problems with the equipment-mainly a lack of charge on the camera-we instead kept with our original plan and filmed the shots at Adam’s house before filming the interrogations scene. The interrogation scenes could not be filmed during the first opportunity we had to do them, again because of faults with the camera, but we did finish the drug dealing scene on the street. However, we decided to re-film some of these shots at a later date, to have plenty of choices during the editing stage of our production.
A good example of the above would be the bathroom scene, where Adam actually had to stand in the bath to film. The art of improvisation is a key weapon in any film director's arsenal. Another good example would be re-doing the scene where a gun is taken out of the bathroom cabinet. For this we could not use a tripod, as we did not have the connector for the camera to be attached securely. So we used the actual environment as the tripod, and this brought a greater realism to the scene, as well as more intimacy with the character in the scene.
When it came to reviewing what we thought would be our final edit before we evaluated or production, we found that we had a major issue, in that it was simply too confusing to be used as an opening to a thriller. To correct this, we decided against using a dual temporal perspective, and instead created a single scene out of the flashbacks and reverted them to full colour. This made the whole production ‘flow’ better when compared to our initial idea of switching between past and present shots.
