3 Minute Short - Recce

Recce

3 Minute Short - Recce

As mentioned in a previous post, Recce's are an extremely important to the film making process. For our political short, we had to do our own Recce. This involved scouting around for locations to use in our films and then take further action if required (like permission from owners etc..).

For my short film, I was quite privileged to be able to use both my own house and my brothers house. I knew what his house was like in terms of layout etc.. and so I was able to briefly plan what my film was going to look like even before I had actually done my official Recce. 

For my short film I wanted two houses that were fairly similar in style/feel and at the same time also had that same age factor about them. Both houses were perfect for this I felt. One house was just slightly more modern than the other house and that is exactly what I wanted to suit both politician characters in this script. 

Here are my Recce shots:

Recce's In general

Just like anything in Pre-Production, Recce's are a vital part, without it your film could be completely different. Recce's are basically a test of a location. It's what determines if you are actually going to be filming there.

The flowchart I have created above shows all the different things that are involved in a Recce. For example, is there going to be accessibility for trucks to transport equipment? If you're up the top of a mountain then that may not be possible, so you'd have to think around that. 

In class today we went out around Bath and went to two locations. And had the criteria of Aliens coming to earth. We then compared them - for location one we went to the local park just around the corner.

For the park it was quite open which has some advantages and disadvantages - we thought of having some visual effects of a UFO flying over. In the park it was surrounded by bare trees which would mean that editing in post would be a major job to mask around each little twig/branch to give the effect that the UFO us actually behind the tree, this is a disadvantage.

This is an example of the masking problem.

Advantage-wise there is more higher and lower points to film from and a lot more trees for a specific look if that's what you're going for.

On location 2 it is much more open, but at the same time it is more concealed, this means much less background noise/wind on the microphones As well as more potential control on lighting. The most important thing I found about this location is the fact that editing a UFO into the shot would be much easier, less time consuming/less money because it is simple shapes such as squares and rectangles of chimney pots on the local houses.

This is the example of how much easier it would be to mask around the chimney pots.

Below is a video time-lapse of the flowchart being created: