Location Research

Location Research 

For an action film the settings are unlimited, you could shoot underground, in a fancy house/building, in a field - anywhere as long as it looks visually stunning. We live on the doorstep of one of the most impressive cities in the world - London - and best of all its free and to film there and only takes and hour or so to get to therefore this is a must have for our film, even if its just a few establishing shots of London from the south bank, with it sat right on our doorstep it would be foolish to miss out. Not only that but the trains going up to London look very impressive on film and, just like Big Ben or London eye, are great signposts to give the audience awareness of where they are in the world.  

For a action trailer the conventions are that there are lots of long shots establishing setting as they want the audience to know what part of the world they're in and what to expect from that environment, also fancy buildings, chase scenes in cities and views from high above the skyline are conventional to help make the film look amazing and eye catching. This is therefore a great excuse to jam in as many establishing shots of fancy cities all around the world as in a trailer they don't necessarily need to be elaborately explained - as long as they're in your film trailer it's going to look high budget and visually stunning. As we're going to America early next year it's a golden opportunity to get some amazing shots of the skyline and other signpost buildings in NYC (Empire state building, Statue of liberty) that will make our film look more like a real action trailer.

To make things even better we are also going to Washington in America so can get some great shots of the White House and we plan to film one of our opening shots in front of the Lincoln memorial - really making our trailer look good. Any other opportunities to film scenes in America we will cease but we plan to have back up shots filmed in London before we go in case for any reason we are unable to get the desired shots. 

We also plan to hopefully get some shots of a plane taking off or landing to add in to our trailer to show our character leaving/arriving certain destination and also possibly get a shot of our main character on the plane which we will take when we are actually flying. A great shot which I fear we may not achieve but we will try anyway is a shot of our main character walking through the airport, this poses so many filming problems and is technically quite hard so I don't hold out much hope of achieving it but never the less we will try.

Also linking back to our shots of London is a perfect opportunity to get night shots of London and shots of a party is when we go to our sixth form boat party on the Thames in London. A few establishing shots of London at night and interior shot of the boat party should be enough so that later on in filming we can add context to these shots and fit them in with the rest of our trailer.

Another possibility is filming on the Isle of Wight - a few shots of our main character stood on the cliff top at dusk could look amazing and add to the effect that our film has a massive budget. This is an added extra and if we don't achieve this our film trailer should still look amazing. Boarding/exiting/riding on the ferry could be a back up for if we cant get the plane shots in America.

For our dramatic pinnacle to our trailer we thought using a rooftop would be dramatic - this is quite hard though and to make it more exciting our characters will race up a multi story car park to the top where they will have a stand off to finish our trailer.

So after some time thinking about different settings we have come up with quite a variety that should hopefully make our film look visually stunning and seem as if we have a very large budget. A summary of the locations we expect to use are:

• Washington
• NYC - plane
• Isle of wight? - ferry
• Boat party
• London
• Multi story car park