Tuesday 19th Jan. Filming

Today we were mainly planning our filming and stuff that we were going to later in the day. Tara had created a request form allowing us to film in D9 after school, which was signed by Nick and seconded by Sue Dulgarn, to prove that she was OK with us filming there.

We gathered the entire cast, who had assembled outside the hall and walked over to the room at about 4:10. On the way to school, i decided i would get a tin of quality street to thank the actors for staying after school to help us out, as they totally didn't have to - especially as one or two of them only had morning lessons. I also picked up some plain white shirts as costumes, as they were supposed to be in detention, it was like a uniform.

When i got to the room, Matt decided to set up a camera in D7, the other room we were allowed to go into, to film the title sequence. This meant we couldn't start filming until later, however as he was only taking one person at a time it did mean that those who were left could re-read their lines and try to rehearse what they were meant to do. I was a bit worried when they were rehearsing because they were messing around and stuff, however when the camera was turned on, they were very well behaved and did exactly what we asked them to do.

The title sequence took a lot longer than i thought it would, and we were only meant to have the room til 5:15, but we got our time extended until about 5:45 so we could finish. To start off with, our organization was terrible. Nobody really knew what to do and we weren't getting anywhere. When we started, however things got moving a lot smoother. As i was the cameraman, i basically moved where i was told and filmed whatever people told me to. Sam was the sound guy so he got in closer with the microphone and stuff so we could record sounds and talking. As a lot of the first episode is narration, we didn't really need the sound, but we have it anyway and can put it in as background noise.

Kirk was the director, but i don't think he was really into it. He agreed on what needed to be done, but seemed a bt hesitant to actually tell people what to do some of the time. When Matt had finished the opening sequence, he didn't really do much, but that's fine, we had basically everything covered. Mike turned up with some scripts and stuff but realistically we could have done without him on set, as he was complaining there were too many people - however as he wrote the script i guess he just wanted to be there to tell us how he thought it should look. Tara technically wasn't needed but i'm really glad she came along. While her designated job role wasn't anything to do with filming, she helped out with the camerawork, suggesting different shots and angles i could film from, she helped Kirk sort out the stroyboards and stuff and generally helped things to run smoother.

I was a bit concerned earlier because while we had the main characters, we didn't have the minor characters to do the flashbacks and stuff with, however we shall record those another day. We also needed a teacher for one of the scenes in the first episode, who we didn't have. Kirk was going to do it, but i felt it would be better to have an actual adult play the part so it didn't just look like a bunch of kids twatting about with a camera. I e-mailed Steve Picton, one of the teachers at our school, who happily agreed to be in our video. This was great, because it made it look much more real. He was very good as well. We got him to fill in a model release form, and gave him his lines and he was told to be really angry, which he did very well.

I think after we got into it a bit, the filming went quite well, but we lost valuable time at the start, which we would need to work on if we are going to get the episodes recorded. We got all of the first episode and the title sequence filmed, i'm not sure if we got much, if any of the second episode, which is a problem we will have to sort out tomorrow. Maybe we could try and film some Thursday morning when we have most of the cast. The only problem is that one of the actors has a full day on Thursday and we can't expect him to miss any for us.