The First Meeting

In the initial meeting we met our clients, which were from the Bath Film Office. The office is a section of the Bath tourism board, which is dedicated to helping photographers and filmmakers to use Bath as a location. Their job involves suggesting locations and helping shoots to run as smoothly as possible, for example by closing any roads.

We also met Sara from Suited and Booted. They are a local film studio that works with youngpeople to produce community-oriented projects.

We were given the brief, which was to produce, in a group, a short film of roughly less than 3 minutes. The purpose of the film was to show off Bath as a potential location for filmmakers, and to emphasize the more gothic side of the city rather than the typical Georgian setting.

The Bath Film Office are to act as our clients and we were told that the film could be put on their website if it was deemed the best. We were also told to designate a member of the group to correspond with the film office to organise permits and sort out locations.

Suited and Booted are to act as our “studio” in helping us with the filming and the post production. They will teach us how to use the professional cameras and editing software and give us general advice about producing a film.

We were organised into our groups and asked to brainstorm ideas about the project. I came up with the basic idea of a vampire story set around bath, and also said that we should probably focus on the more romantic aspects of Gothic fiction, rather than horror. Sara told us that if the film is on a website it should be watchable without sound, so this inspired the group to come up with the idea of a silent film. We also wanted to give the film a modern aesthetic style so we suggested isolating a single colour (we chose red) in the style of Sin City or Don’t Look Now. I asked Sara if we needed to be careful whilst shooting and she said yes, first of all not to include any red objects and secondly not to make it look like a silent comedy and more like a gothic drama.