Wednesday 9 February 2011

Location Hunting

On friday myself, Nat, James and Perri ventured out to London. We explored Waterloo, Southbank and London Bridge. While Matt and Will explored Shoreditch. The aim was to find a location in one of these areas that would be a suitable location for our project. So things that we needed to ensure the location provided were plenty of obstacles. This is so we can showcase our characters Parkour skills. Parkour gives off a very urban theme. Matt and Will were exploring this more in Shoreditch. While looking out for these sort of locations we also needed to consider space and make sure that there was enough space to bring our 3D monster into the scene. Location hunting will provide to be a vital stage of pre-production as it will help us to visualise how the project is going to look and will help to give us a more realistic storyboard and animatic.

Unfortunately to my stupidity I forgot my camera when we went looking at locations, however I have managed to find some images of some of the places we looked at. Yet there is a positive to finding images rather than taking my own and that is that some of  the images i found were taken at night. This is a positive because we visited the area in the day so the nighttime images show a different view. Below are the images of some of the places that I thought would be ideal for our project and provided obstacles that were vital for showcasing our characters Parkour skills.















I found this trip very beneficial as it gave me a clear indication of the sort of area that our piece should be filmed in. Key attributes the area needed were obstacles that would showcase our characters Parkour skills and a theme that makes our project stand out, such as an urban theme that matches the theme of Parkour.

 However there are a few major drawbacks, the first drawback would be that with these area's being in central London they are heavily populated pretty much all the time. Therefore it would be difficult to film as there would always be people getting in the way, and would provide a problem for our project. The reason I say that is because if you have a huge monster chasing a man through a heavily populated street I'm pretty sure the other people in the street are going to react and run away themselves, so it would be pretty challenging trying to get every passer by to act for us. The other problem which I thought this area had was that despite having some obstacles for our Parkour character there were not enough obstacles located near each other. Basically there were some stairs that would be perfect to showcase some Parkour skills and would work well in our chase sequence yet once you have over come them then there was just a flat straight path for a fair while before you came to the next obstacle. Therefore this area is better suited for just a normal chase sequence rather than the chase sequence we have in mind. 

The images above show some of the problems I am talking about. Overall I think it is safe to say that we have ruled out this area for our project, now we need to find some more areas to go and look at and hopefully find a location thats better suited to our project.