Creative Journal ~ Locations

When finding locations for filming we had decided on locations that we would have to travel to so we could create the atmosphere of the protagonist travelling so we could portray it through editing. However, we soon discovered finding locations would be harder then we first intended. Below is a summary of what happened when finding locations and incidents that happened when filming on them.

 

11^th November 2016

            Birmingham

We took a crew of eight people to film in Birmingham Grand Central. Upon arriving we scouted the area for a café that we believed had the aesthetic that we wanted to be portrayed in the production, the café we had concluded, is shown below. We had requested permission off of the manager to film within his café which we received with ease. However, we was not aware that we needed permission off of Grand Central itself as we believed that we only needed permission off of the café. This resulted in the group being pulled aside by security, this then developed into a situation where myself and another member of the group was taken to senior management to discuss getting permission to film that day, however, we were unsuccessful due to the absence of the marketing director. We received a business card with contact information to further discuss permission. However, we decided against this due to a change in relationships within the group and the modification of the narrative.

We considered a range of locations within Grand Central however we deducted the options down to two, the one we chose is shown above, the other option is shown below. We came to a conclusion that we would use the location called “Muffin Break” as the other location was very busy and this would cause issues when filming and would develop to become very unpractical for filming.

We returned to the Sixth Form and did further research on the permission and how long it would take in order to get it. After some research we collected the screenshots shown below, which states that we would need Public Liability Insurance, which is a sum of £5 million to cover, which as students we are unable to fund. Therefore we considered other options.

30^th November 2016

We decided to attempt and gain access to Birmingham Library in order to shoot scenes that we required for the first 15 seconds for the opening sequence before the song starts. However we experienced a new issue that we had to resolve, however we encountered the same problem with Public Liability Insurance. The screenshots demonstrated above is the link that the reply sent us to, therefore we knew that we would have difficulty getting permission due to the £5 million Public Liability Insurance.

The e-mail we sent is shown below:

The reply we received is shown below:

Upon receiving this we took it upon ourselves to look at the website provided and others which contained information filming permission. We discovered the website the email provided us contained the most information. Below are some screenshots that we believed to provide the most important pieces of information and most relevant to our situation.  We discovered the method on how to enquire about filming permission, however as you can see we encountered a similar problem of the public liability insurance that we once again couldn’t establish. We continued to explore the website for anyone we could personally contact in order to see if we could be granted permission as we were students and couldn’t afford the public liability insurance, however instead we came across a form that needed to fill out but once again needed reference to public liability insurance which we have not obtained. Below is the form we found:

2nd December 2016
A  plan was established to film in Kingsbury Waterpark, as we believed that the outside environment and open fields and lake would help us create the atmosphere that we desired to present in our production. We took pictures of the areas we intended to us, including benches to present a photoshoot scene that we wanted to incorporate within the production. These images are presented below.

We decided to seek permission with whomever it may concern so we didn’t have the same incident we had in Birmingham, this resulted in us seeking permission in the ‘Information Centre’ that the park has. There we were told that we would have to ask a manager of the park, whom were currently on holiday and would be back in the next two weeks, which we didn’t see being useful to our production plan, however they continued to give us a sheet which we could send to her with our contact details meaning we may get a response quicker. However, we ran into the monotonous detail that we would need Public Liability Insurance once again, so we decided against using the area.