Location Recce-Scout before you shoot

 What and where?

When we look at a location there's a lot that goes into the where of a production like legal problems (which we covered in the Legal post) not to mention thinking about the actual possibility of the production being actually viable in that area and whether it's necessary to use somewhere else.

Now depending on what production your doing you'll need to think about the location itself. If you're making a drama then maybe have a setting that can help establish the feel of the scene and better cement what you want the audience to take from the surroundings not just the characters.

For now though lets stick in the context of our production and the promo video. Now for the tone and general feel we aimed to get a strong up beat tone focused around discovery and learning so a hot contender for our location was a public park in a local town.

However this didn't pan out too well as there were a number of concerns and issues that were raised with the area itself such as its location means that its used an awful lot by people as a path in-between places like jobs or the high street etc. which meant that we unfortunately had to scrap that idea upon further inspection.

Luckily however we had a back-up location we could use for the video that we had waiting on incase something like this was going to happen. This is where our contingency plan comes into place, thinking about where things can go wrong allows for better coverage in the case that things do go wrong or what we plan for originally becomes unavailable. In this case we made sure to cover our location to ensure that we can still film but we don't have to lose anything.

The area that we have chosen for filming is known as Burbage Common, it's mainly used by people who go on longer walks and dog-owners but it's a large public space with a lot of areas that we were looking for when planning out our storyboard and reaches most of the marks that we needed. There's an additional benefit to this to in that the type of location it is allows for us to control more, I know that sounds strange but don't forget that earlier I said environment can help to set the theme or feeling of the video/scene therefore making sure that we can get the most control over the scene we can get and having this type of an area used for filming lets us control the message we want the audience to get.

The main reason behind picking this area is to make sure that we have that extra element of control behind what we want our audience to get from the production to make sure that our message is clear from the video about what the app is and what we want the audience to get from it.

Well hopefully this has given you a clearer idea of how location recces are used within a production and how a setting for a video will impact its setting.

Have a great day!