Locations for Blackmail

It was important that we thought about the locations of our film and all agreed on where would be most suitable. We had to take into consideration the times of day would be using certain locations, the availability and using the equipment safely. At first most of our suggestion wouldn’t fit in with the times we would be available to film and we didn’t want to have to rely on other people, so we came to the conclusion that using our own houses would work a lot better as we could film any time we wanted and take as long as we needed. We used three different house for our film, along with an office at school and the main hall for the premiere.

The pictures on the left are where we shot the scenes for Nancy's house. We picked this house in particular for Nancy's house because the front of the house opened up on to vast fields, which allowed us lots of room for film and also creating large establishing shot and deep shots from within the house. The front door had patterned glass which would create an interesting shadow effect on the actor’s faces when placed in a certain position.

 

These pictures in particular show the establishing shot and deep shot we were able to capture while filming. The house had a big drive way which allowed us to film long shots of Clark and Martha walking to Nancy's house. The wall at the front of the was perfect for scene seven, were Martha posts the newspaper draft through Nancy's front door. Having such an open space to work with also allowed us to play around with the camera angles a bit. Some of our tracking shits turned into a canted angle shot - a typical convention of film noir.


We filmed the scene in the living room at Nancy's because it gave us a great opportunity to get a really good depth of field, deep shot through the window. It also meant that the viewer had a clear view of Martha, which would have been difficult if the filming had been in any other room.
We had to make sure the decor of this room was very simplistic. Having modern day furniture would have taking the audience out of the story and made them focus on the unusual props, so when we filmed in this room we had to be very careful where we placed the camera.

This is the house we used for Martha and Clark's house. We decided to use this house in particular because of the kitchen. This was the closest we could get to a '1950's' styled kitchen. On the picture to the left is marked some changes we had to make to the room to make the set more believable. Modern day toasters, dishwasher’s, microwaves and Tesco bag's would have been around during the time in which our film was taking place so we had to remove them from the frame or be very careful where we were filming.

Having a window at the top of the stairs allowed us to experiment with different lightings and shadows. On sunny days the shadows of the venetian blinds would show on the wall, which would work really well and keep in the theme and using the conventions of film noir.

The front door was probably the hardest set of this house as it didn't resemble a typical 1950's door, but as this wasn't a major part in our film it didn't matter so much. However the diamond, frosted glass in black and white created a nice effect once edited.

This set with the venetian blinds was meant to be in Martha's living room. However it isn’t the same house as we used for Martha's original house. We changed the house because venetian blinds are in my eye's the most important convention of film noir and if we hadn't included them in our film the genre wouldn't of been as clear as it could. We had to make sure the editing was perfect at this point in the film so the audience wouldn't know it the scene was taken in a different house, and so the scene flowed nicely from one to another. The venetian blinds create an eerie effect upon a character making you double think your opinion on them.

Clark’s work office is the final set we used. This was used of scenes when Clark was alone working, or with Nancy. The small modern office had quite a transformation, as we couldn’t have any computers, modern telephones, or posters in the shot.
Clark’s work office is the final set we used. This was used of scenes when Clark was alone working, or with Nancy. The small modern office had quite a transformation, as we couldn’t have any computers, modern telephones, or posters in the shot. This space was rather hard to work in as it was very compact and it was often difficult to capture long shots of the action happening. We often used the tripod but for this set in particular we found that holding the camera worked better as we could maneuverer at lot easily.