Filming Day: Winter Wonderland

Location: Winter Wonderland, Cardiff Central

Date: 15th of November

Group members present: Hannah Martin, Jade Dibble, Caitlin Elward and Jasmine Greene






We chose to use this location to film, as we wanted to make use of the bright and colourful lighting that this venue has. We thought that these shots would be representative of the LGBT+ themes within our video, and they would create a stark contrast to the more melancholy coloured shots with Josh. In the evening, the rides light up, which in previous years has created some wonderful landscape photography opportunities for us. It was these experiences that made us consider this location, as we knew that it looked good on camera.

We arrived at location just prior to 5pm, to ensure that we could start filming at that time. We had worked out with our previous visit to scout the location, that 5pm was the optimum time for us to film. The lighting at this time mean that the colourful lights would stand out very prominently against the dark background in shots. We were concerned about the quality of the shots we would have achieved in dark lighting, as the filming equipment we had was not advanced enough to film with flawless quality in minimal lighting. However, we discovered that the lighting at 5pm was perfect, as it did not cause the footage to be grainy, and it did not reduce the quality as we had previously worried about.

We planned the shots we would film in this location carefully. We wanted to use them to enhance the focus on the developing relationship between Jade and Hannah's characters. As a result of this, we ensured that we would use multiple two shots, and also P.O.V shots. As demonstrated on the left, the P.O.V shot aims to help to develop the audiences understanding of the relationship between the two females, by giving the audience the impression that they are viewing Jade's characters through the eyes of Hannah's character, as the shot is from her perspective. This helps the audience to engage, as they feel directly involved in the narrative.

A problem...

Whilst we were filming in this location, we did encounter certain issues. Most were very minor, however, there was one in particular that caused problems; the volume of members of the public present at the location.

The day we chose to film on was a Friday, as this was the only night we could organise to travel there together in which we were all free. Winter Wonderland is always very busy on a Friday night, as it is the beginning of the weekend, however, we had to make it work. It was necessary for us to achieve what we needed to when filming on this day as we were not aware of a time that we could revisit the location.

When filming, we found that people would walk in front of the camera, and this would obstruct and ruin the shot that we were trying to achieve. This difficulty can be demonstrated in this clip:

It was off-putting for Hannah and Jade whilst they were acting, as I often had to stop and start scenes spontaneously due to where people were walking, or in regards to us finding a gap in the crowd. However, they were both very professional and worked past these difficulties.

In my role as director, I was responsible for instructing what would go on in a scene. I had to tell Jade and Hannah what to do, and how to do it, whilst describing the shot that I wanted to achieve out of it. Here is a short video in which you can hear me directing Jade and Hannah: