Production Schedule - Casting and Location

Production Schedule

Casting

After having completed the storyboard and script I had a confident idea of how to go about creating the movie. I collected a few friends to play the actors within my movie, a total of 5 actors to play 5 characters, additionally I needed my own direction of how the movie would be filmed and how to follow the storyboard in collaboration with the script and Tony Cash provided the role of cameraperson. 

I gathered my actors in early October and gave those with speaking roles copies of the script to prep them for the film. Casting actually became a problem throughout the production of the movie as certain actors had conflicting schedules which required the production dates to be decided carefully. A rough set of shots was filmed in late October for a rough idea of how the movie would look, unfortunately the footage captured could not be used due to low audio quality and the fact that it was incomplete, additionally the footage featured an actor who was later re-casted entirely due to schedule conflictions. Before filming my finalised casting crew became solidified:

Alistair Goodwin as Detective Gilbert (Main character)
Harry Kelly as Detective Patmore (Secondary Character)
Amy Morris as Olivia Garnet (Femme Fatale)
Lee Bradley as Charles Graves (Background character)
Bradley Lee as Ned Henry (Corpse)

Location

After having a reliable cast I decided to go out with my partner and find a suitable filming location for the movie. I explored a few areas around Tamworth for my movie, initially I was thinking of an area near a river which I had visited on a Duke of Edinburgh walk and though would be suitable, however upon revisiting the location I found the ground to be much too wet and sludgy to have any kind of filming equipment or footwear on. I decided to have the location at a nearby nature reserve in Amington, which is very close to the houses of all the actors involved, which made it convenient and the ground was suitable for equipment and footwear. The location is surrounded in many tall trees and quite murky surfaces, there is also a small swamp-like lake on set which will appear in the film as a local landmark in the story, I chose the area because it seemed like a suitable location for a murder crime scene and I felt that It's muddy appearance would invite a dark Film Noir style atmosphere to the movie.  (add pictures of location here later)

Production Schedule

Upon having my cast and location sorted I had to find out which days would be suitable to get the footage. I found that the entirety of my cast was available every Sunday for filming, so I scheduled the filming of the movie every Sunday, however in the end I only needed a single day to collect all of the footage required.

Filming Footage and Role Allocation

After having everything ready I started filming in mid November, with myself as the writer, director and later the editor and Tony Cash as the cameraperson who took care of capturing the footage. After having audio problems in our practice recording in October we decided to make use of a voice recorder suspended on a sturdy stick to capture audio better and later overlap it with the footage to get a better audio quality. In addition Tony provided a pop filter for the voice recorded to reduce the risk of background noise. As we pressed record on the camera we suspended the voice recorder close to the actors while still out of shot in order to get decent quality audio capture. After completing all of the footage recording which additionally required audio recordings at the same time we recorded voiceovers off camera to be placed onto scenes later in editing.