The Day of the Shoot

The day of the shoot went fairly smoothly and we got done everything that we needed, so I don't feel that at the moment we will need to do any reshoots. The weather was wet, but not raining enough to pick up on the camera, instead it gave the square a wet, miserable look, which turned out quite well, in evoking a similar emotion. The problem with this was that we had to keep wiping the lens of the camera, and a few shots had a droplet of water in them. Seeming as the lens was quite small, one droplet of water is quite big, but fortunately the shots with the water on them were not essential to the storyline.

We did encounter a rather major problem whilst filming, which was that we couldn't gain access to the lift, as there was a cleaner refusing to let people in, meaning we had to find an alternative location for the fight sequence, without going too far. We decided on filming it on the steps around the side of the square, as there weren't that many people there...or so we thought. Whilst filming it quite a lot of people did walk past, so we had to keep stopping and starting, but we got it done in the end. This change of location also meant that we had to re-choreograph the fight sequence, without all the features of the lift, and including the geography of the steps. To try and not waste too much time, we split into two units, one of us filming Richard and James's shots in the square and Lee and I choreographing and practising the fight sequence.

Back in the main square we had an interesting time filming Richard fall into the fountain. We remembered all the equipment we needed for the day, except a towel, so afterwards Richard was left to drip dry. Fortunately it was only his face and hands that went into the fountain, so that we didn't make too much disturbance. A few passers-by laughed at him. We filmed the scene three times, but only one really showed it to it's best potential, and after that Richard refused to fall in any more.

It was very hard to film the running scenes, as you have to run at the same speed as the actor, whilst keeping a camera steady, so we filmed the run many times from multiple angles. To get the moving shots we just ran at the same pace and didn't bother trying to keep the camera steady, reasoning that with the number of shot that we took, we'd be able to get a few decent ones. A cool shot that we managed to get was from up Nelson's Column. I climbed up a few layers and filmed Lee running from there, which gave it a very high budget look.
We also did some of the filming in horseguards parade, as planned, and this turned out better than expected, as we were worried that it might look strange due to the different times of day that we filmed each side of the scene. We were also worried that we might be stopped filming there, as there was a guard patrolling up and down the corridor when we scouted it.
Altogether it was a very successful day, and we got everything done that we needed to and to good quality as well. As much as I would have liked to have filmed the fight scene in the lift, filming it on the steps by the side of the square worked quite well. We also didn't get stopped by anyone, despite quite high security who didn't seem to notice a fight, someone falling in a fountain, and someone sprinting desparately across the square.