Main Task - Location Research

As part of our film opening, we had planned on having the main character Peter writing a letter in his bedroom, so we somehow needed to create a set that looked like a believable 17 year olds bedroom. We definitely wanted to conform to the stereotypes of a teenager, and therefore create a typical setting for a 17 year old boy. Fortunately, one of the members of our team had an older brother, so we therefore had a perfect teenage boy's bedroom to film in. In the room we had chosen for our location, there was a window which had a black coloured blind in front of it, which allowed us to make it appear like it was during the night, rather than mid-day when the shots were going to be done. Also, because this allowed us to block out most of the light in the room, it made Peter look particularly isolated, which is how we planned to communicate his character to the audience.

As part of our storyboard and shot list, we had planned to have a tracking shot of the bedroom, however once we visited the location, we realised it was slightly smaller than we had anticipated, therefore making the tracking shot more difficult, as there wasn't much room to move. Although the room was smaller than we had hoped, we didn't want to get rid of the tracking shot completely, so we thought we would give it a go on shoot day, and see how it went.

We moved the room around quite a bit in order to shoot. We placed a desk under the headphones on the desk, as that was going to be the centre of focus for the opening, so we needed it to be in a place that could easily be filmed, and a place that would give us the most room when attempting the tracking shot. We also placed a bedside table next to the desk, as we knew we had a lot of items to place around the shooting area, so we thought this would be useful to have, rather than making the desk too busy and far too cluttered (even more cluttered than a teenage boy would make it).
We ensured that the bedroom was quite cluttered, as it I thought that teenagers don't seem to enjoy tidying, and would much rather live surrounded by their own mess than tidy up after themselves. We also made sure that the bedroom was quite dark, including making some props such as the duvet cover black and white, as in recent years, there has become a stereotype that teenagers are very depressed and isolated, and we wanted to translate that into Peter's bedroom.