Location Scouting - Horse Guards Parade

Whilst in London, we also visited Horse Guards Parade, to see how it would work as a possible location for the opening two minutes of our film. We visited this after Trafalgar Square.

Horse Guards Parade plays a small part in our film, in fact only a few shots, as it is the other side of a phone conversation between Davidson and his boss Caprivi. This is the Caprivi side. We picked it because it's not too far away from Trafalgar Square and is quite iconic, not to the extent that a worldwide audience would recognise it, but it still looks very high budget. The path way through the arch (lower picture) has a very nice look to it, that would look very good to walk through. The character is being shadowed by an assassin, so it would be a very intimidating place for the assassin to appear behind him. There is a couple of issues with filming here, however, the
main one being that there is a guard that patrols the 'tunnel', and we'll have to try and avoid him if we don't want to get our heads chopped off with a sabre. Fortunately, he does not constantly patrol up and down, but stays at one end for around ten minutes and then switches sides, so we can film it one side at a time, avoiding his gaze. The other main issue with filming here is that there are quite a lot of people passing through the alley. They are mainly tourists, but they could prove to be difficult, and our actor may not like filming in

these circumstances. There are no other major problems associated with filming there, except the obvious restrictions of no reflector boards, boom mics or fake guns. It is convenient to get to, as we will probably film there straight after filming at Trafalgar Square, and it's about 5-10 mins walk away. There will only be a few shots filmed there, but we'll have to be careful what time of day we film there, as we don't want to have completely different lighting crossing between the scenes. To be honest, this location hardly features in the film, but is none-the-less needed, and we thought we might as well pick a location that looks good, even for a couple of shots, as it really brings up our production value.