Second day of filming (19th of February 2012)...

Scenes filmed
Scene 5 (second half)
Scene 9
Scene 12

Actors required
Ben Cartwright – Sheldon Rex
Lucy Cunnington – Sylvia Freeman
Myself – Reece Freeman

Locations used
Ashwell Springs
Phonebox
Daniel’s house (exterior)
Stairway
Bedroom

The second day of filming was a lot smoother as we were more familiar with the equipment. Although we did encounter some problems when it came to filming the final death scene as we planned to have Ben fall face first into the water after being shot. The cold weather made this an uncomfortable, and somewhat dangerous, shoot for him so we wanted to get it done in the quickest time possible within the smallest number of takes. This made taking multiple angles problematic but we managed to work around this by planning exactly how we wanted it to look before hand so we were not experimenting with different angles. We also had to make sure we filmed this section last so that he did not have a soaking wet costume in the other scene we had to film.
 We managed our time well during this shoot in order to get it done without wasting any time. We did this by splitting into two groups. While Dan talked Ben through the shooting scene and how that was going to work and the working through the angles and shots he wanted I took Lucy off to film the second half of scene 5 (the phone call). I used a very clever shot in this scene which was an extreme close up of Lucy’s lips when she is talking on the phone. I chose to use this shot as it would keep the identity of Lucy’s character a secret from the audience and add to the mystery which is a key concept in film noir. My inspiration for this shot came from a 1979 movie called ‘The Warriors’ in which a mysterious radio DJ is shown in the same way when speaking into the microphone.  

Lucy Cunnington in 'Cracked Secrets'

Lynne Thigpen in 'The Warriors'

 














Another shot I decided to use was a shot of Lucy's legs and lower body as she is walking to the phone box. I chose to use this shot as it coincides with Laura Mulvey's 'Male Gaze' theory which places the viewer, or audience, into the perspective of a heterosexual male which is very prominent when women are on screen in both classic and neo noir film noir films. 



Another classic convention of film noir films was included in our next scene. Venetian blinds are a key element in the majority of noir films and we were very keen to include them in ours. We used Venetian blinds in the next scene we shot to, again, keep the identity of the woman a secret to the audience. We managed to get the classic light through the blinds look by having one member of our group stand outside and shine a torch through the blinds while another member filmed the shot. This was a very simple but effective way of obtaining a classic noir shot.

A classic noir shot of a character looking through Venetian blinds.
This was obtained by a crew member shining a torch at the window
from outside.

 
With these scenes done we only needed one more day of filming to get all the footage we needed before we could move onto editing. Again we decided when we were to film next. We decided we would film the final scene on the 22nd of February.