Third and final day of filming (22nd February 2012)...

Scenes filmed
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3

Actors required
Ben Cartwright – Sheldon Rex
Daniel Cowie – John Barnacles
Tom Batt – Drug dealer
Myself – Reece Freeman

Locations
School classroom
School office
Alleyway

Our third and final day of filming was our quickest and most productive as we managed to the remainder of our scenes filmed, which meant getting a lot of footage. The first two scenes we shot, the opening and the meeting between Barnacles and Rex, were easy to shoot as they are both short scenes so they didn’t take very long. The first scene we shot on this day was the introduction to the film which would be played alongside the opening credits. In this scene Freeman, played by myself, is reading a newspaper, possibly the newspaper Rex writes for, which features a front page article about Freeman’s run for Governor. We wanted to have this scene as we wanted a quick and easy way to introduce the characters of the film in order to make it clear for the audience. This scene was the easiest to film and we managed to get it done in one take.

Shot introducing the character of Reece Freeman.

 The next scene, where Barnacles tells Rex about the drug deal, was also easy to film. This was Dan’s first piece of acting and I was very pleased with it. He managed to portray the character very well and was able to show that he had clear authority over Rex. In this scene we used a lot of two shots featuring both Rex and Barnacles in order to show the close relationship between the two characters. At the end of the scene I chose to use an extreme close up of Barnacles mouth when he says “Get on it” in order to show his authority over Rex. Personally I feel this is one of the best edited scenes in the entire film.

Two shot of Barnacles and Rex.

Extreme close up of Barnacles.

  

The final scene we had to film was the drug deal scene. As mentioned previously this scene was first written to take place at the Freeman manor but we changed it to an alleyway as we wanted to shoot it in a more dark and sinister urban location. Another change we made to this scene was to remove the dialogue as we felt that would help the scene run smoother as when we practised it the dialogue seemed awkward and didn’t really add anything to scene. The final change we made to the scene was to have Freeman kill the dealer himself rather than have a bodyguard do it as we wanted to portray just how ruthless the character of Freeman really is. I decided to use a very clever camera angle in this scene in order to create a sense of suspense for the audience when Freeman opens the briefcase of drugs. I achieved this by setting the camera to film and then placing it inside the briefcase so in the scene you hear the click of the briefcase and you then have a shot of Freeman grinning with a cigar. This is a highly professional camera angle used by several Hollywood directors, most notably Quentin Tarantino in his films ‘Jackie Brown’ and ‘Reservoir Dogs’.  We managed to make ours look very professional as well which I was very happy with.

Reece opening Briefcase in 'Cracked Secrets'.

Similar shot of character's opening the
boot of a car in Quentin Tarantino's
'Reservoir Dogs'.

 

With all our filming done our next job in the film making process was to edit it all together and come up with our finished product.