Major Production Unit: Production - Second Week

The second week of filming saw us shooting all of the exterior scenes and turned out to be a very successful week. We finished on the Thursday, a whole day ahead of schedule and with no setbacks or compromises.

The new location for the woods was the perfect setting for the campsite and really gave the sense of isolation that Sean begins to increasingly feel over the course of the film.

Shooting in exterior scenes is very tricky to do as you have to work around a lot of noises that are out of our control. This forced me to become more efficient in my directing and was a good challenge to take on. Because we had prepared for each scene and knew they would work, having considered the conditions in the locations, the production was a lot smoother than the first day was in the previous week.

Overall it was a great two weeks of filming. I was very tired mentally at the end of each day but there was this astounding sense of achievement, knowing it was one part of a bigger thing and that the final product would be a piece to be proud of. I've definitely learned that directing is a lot more complex than it first appears and being around very strong and professional actors was a fantastic opportunity to be a part of.

There were only a handful of scenes left to shoot, spread over 3 days over the course of the next couple of weeks which we also got without any issues (aside from bad weather during one of them). A reshoot was required for the final scene (38) as a single, floating shot wasn't good enough to give the right impact the film needed to finish on. Originally the camera would start facing the wall as the end of a graphic match and move down and to the left, revealing Archie dead with a knife in his chest. It would then finish by moving backwards to a wide shot before fading to black. Although the shot looks nice in concept, it didn't in practice. The reshoot resolved this with lots of different angles and shots for the Editor to piece together a lingering death scene that finished with a close up on Archie as he dies in front of us, a much harder impact as the audience can't look away (something they could have done with a wide shot) and creates an overall uncomfortable moment: exactly what I was after.