Location notes, including risk assessment and casting

1. Location, Risk Assessment
and Casting

2. Location
• For the narrative, I knew I needed a lot of ground space to enable the characters to have this war.
• Therefore, I considered different parks and fields which we could use to film on that wouldn’t be too crowded and
could have a background which wouldn’t show the urban surroundings such as roads etc.
• I came up with two choices of location which were Ockwells park in Maidenhead, near my school or Burnham Park.
I chose these two locations as they were the most convenient choices that I could revisit easily and re-film certain
shots if needed.
• However, I chose to use Burnham Park in the end as when surveying the two locations I realised that Burnham has
a lot of trees surrounding the park which will allude to the idea that this narrative was not set in a urban
environment, blocking off the road effectively.
• An advantage of the location is the spacious area which allowed me to choose which particular area of the park I
wanted to use, it is also nearby to my house which means its easy to visit and evaluate the best places to take
shots in and plan for the real day.
• As my friends don’t live as nearby, it was quite difficult as when I invited them round we had to film the shots in one
go as I wasn’t sure whether or not they would all be able to make the next date of filming to catch up as some may
be busy.
• Another issue which I faced was that I wanted to use coloured powder which we weren’t if it was going to stain or
not, therefore we were slightly tedious to whether or not we should use the local park to film in case we were
caught.
• I overcame this issue by letting my friends sleep over my house so that we could leave at 8am so that there would
be less people around and there was less chance of being told we couldn’t film there.
• As the location is near to where I live meant that the weather forecast for Burnham Bucks was applicable to my
location to film so that I knew it would be dry weather and we wouldn’t have to deal with the issue of rain or too
much wind.

3. Casting
• It was easy to cast the singer role for my music video as I knew I
needed to have someone who would easily be accessible if I wanted
to film extra shots and that was willing to perform the way I desired.
• Therefore, I decided to use the same main character as in my AS
opening scene to a film – my sister.
• As my sister, Emma, had previous skills of acting in not only my AS
film but from taking part in plays in her old secondary school. This
meant that she was confident with acting out the shots I designed in
the storyboard and was able to improvise with particular shots to
make them even more effective.
• The only issue with using my sister was that because she is at
university meant that I was able to film over summer, however when
it came to the school term she had to go back to uni which was over
four hours away which meant I had to film this selection of shots
earlier than I anticipated so that I could have Christmas holidays to
re-film any extra shots that weren’t to the standard I wanted.
• The narrative was more difficult to cast as even though all my
friends were willing to be in the narrative, many couldn’t make dates
at the weekend due to working.
• Therefore to overcome this situation I used only four of my friends
who could attend and my aunt and cousin as an alternative.

4. Risk Assessment
Risks I could have encountered:
• Not having the sufficient equipment
• Public getting in shots
• Weather forecast not being correct and having to reschedule
• Getting told we couldn’t film in that particular area
• Forgetting storyboard
• Characters not being able to turn up last minute
• Danger to the equipment, if it is dropped, knocked over, used incorrectly
• Not having the props needed available
• Not enough sufficient space
• Equipment not working
Risks I did encounter:
• Public did walk past camera a few times and interrupted filming by asking what we were doing
which meant it took longer time to film.
• There was also the worry that we would be told to move from the primacies.
• I also forgot to bring one of the props which were the balloons, luckily I was able to go back and
get the prop as the park is located nearby.
Conclusion:
Overall, the majority of my filming went to plan and there weren’t any major difficulties that I
encountered which couldn’t be solved with simple solutions. This meant I was able to complete
my filming before the given deadline and edit the shots I had before others giving me a headstart
which enabled me to go back and take more shots of the live performance if I wanted.