group project pre-production

Project members:

Tom Hopkins, Kate Pritchard, Adam Jones, Sam Simmonds

Project title: Beach Body

Our project began with the member selection, I had worked with Tom and Adam before on our radio project last semester, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with them again. Katie is genius at organizing and planning, so she really rounded out the team.

Together we ran through a few ideas for the project. A chase movie, drama, comedy etc. But we settled on the beach body idea after I suggested that we begin the film with a shot of a dead body on a beach and then ran back through the series of events that resulted with the body.

We went down to the location, Sand Bay, and took the camera with us to shoot some simulations. I wanted to get a feel for how the beach looked on camera and to run through some ideas for framing the shots. This was a really useful exercise, and it gave me a lot more ideas for shots and angles and content.

Tom suggested that it would be interesting if the body on the beach was completely ignored by anyone who encountered it. We adapted the original idea to the final pitch. A family goes to the beach for the day and sits next to a dead body, but ignores it completely. Then when they leave we see that the beach is covered in bodies. I wanted to incorporate footage of real dead bodies, in various natural disasters and wars etc. The point being that we chose to ignore what goes on around the world every day, and we can easily by changing the channel or reading another article. But if we had to deal with death on a daily basis, many people do for various reasons around the world, would we be able to do the same? The film poses the question, and by mixing in shots of war and death we will hopefully drive the point home.
We also decided to have very little dialogue for several reasons. In previous experiences, its usually the sound that is the hardest to get right on 0 budget films, and filming on location adds a million different variables to the problem. I knew from filming a recce that even with no wind, wind sound would be a problem on the beach, as well as working with inexperienced actors having to earn lines. Although my lead actor is a very experienced American actor, everyone else would be amatures.
So cutting out the need for dialogue really helped in the planning and expectations. We may well add some dialogue later on, recorded in the studio, taking care to shoot in such a way that this can be done without the need for syncing to actors mouth movement.
I am really looking forward to the shoot and working with everyone. We need to cast, although I have cast the main part already. One of the children will be played by my daughter and the other by a family friend. We just need to cast the 'mother', which I am working on now.