3rd Year Production Unit: Helping on another shoot

For a few days over the past two weeks, I have been helping another group with shoots for their project. The first one of these was in in Strood, so was easy for me to travel to by train. I knew that we were filming a test shoot, which would be some interviews, but I did not know what the location was going to be like, other than it being a workshop. When I got to the location, i saw that it was a workshop for building racing cars, and the people at the garage were actually building a car for Alex, the director of the group I am helping, as the film they are doing is a documentary about Alex becoming a race car driver. We had a look around the workshop and decided where would be best to have the interviews, and then proceeded to conduct the interviews. I was on one of the cameras, and had to get a medium shot of Alex, who was the interviewee. We did several takes of the questions that the group had prepared, and it went very well. 

Next, we needed to get some footage of Alex getting into his car, so this part was more handheld footage, whereas the interviews were shot using a camera on a tripod. This allowed us to use the whole space of the workshop to get some good angles of the car. however, we had to be careful when moving around the garage as there were a few things that we could have walked into, such as a rear axel that was poking out a bit, and a table that was in front of some stairs, which I was able to go up onto the second floor and get some arial pictures of Alex in the car. 


In total, the whole shoot took a few hours, which was about the amount of time that George, the producer of the group, had thought it would take. We managed to get a lot of good shots, and this will definitely help the group when they come to film at this location for the real thing.