The Shoot

We came up with a number of ideas for our opening and then discussed what would be the most achievable and made the opening most effective. We had to use someone's house for the opening as the girls were getting ready for a party. We decided to use my friend Bee's house as she has a corridor leading to the rest of her house, the colour scheme is nice inside and she lives in a middle class area.

We did not account for the weather when we shot the opening as on the day it turned out to be raining. This made some changes to our opening, for example the shot of Ella walking into the house is played with the sound of rain creating a gloomy eery feeling which is not neccessarily what we expected to had. I think that we worked well round this and still created the effect that we had hoped.

When filming throughout the day, we had problems with lighting as the sky cleared, but this was easily solved by using the 'day into night' effect on iMovie. Also, as the room we were in was so bright we had to shut the curtains to make it feel more like an evening, this made the picture distorted as the camera was having to use poor quality lighting. This was one down side to our filming but we tried to edit out as much of the poor quality parts as we could.

Lastly, due to the fact that we had not written a script, the characters were not able to get fully into the role by just reading a character description that we made. We didn't think that this would make too much difference as we didn't expect to put as much diologue into the final piece, and the pieces that we did use did not last for very long and were only minor bits in the storyline.

Here is the character description that we gave each of the actresses to read before shooting:

Izzy and Emily have been friends for as long as they remember, and when Hayley and Ella joined their school in Year 11, the 4 girls became best friends and are now inseparable. At schools the girls aren't the most popular but at the weekends they like to go out and have a good time, especially when there's something to celebrate.

Izzy

She is 17 years old and quite self-confident. She has pretty good fashion sense although it looks effortless. Her part-time job is in Topshop where she works as a sales assistant when she's not at sixth form during the rest of the week. She's not a girly girl but not a tom-boy either; she's just an average normal girl. At this point in time she is single and takes her mind off her ex by street dancing in her spare time. She has a younger sister and also an older step-sister from her dads re-marriage.

Hayley

Hayley is 18 in a few weeks time. She is an energetic cheery girl who can talk for England. She's also really interested in clothes and always wears a splash of pink. She doesn't have her own job but gets the money to go out from her parents who both have fairly highly paid jobs. She is an only child but doesn't notice it most of the time as she has her best friends around her acting like sisters.

Emily

Emily is the only 18 year old in the group of girls and often plays the sensible role in the group as she's used to looking after her two younger brothers. She earns her money by babysitting as well as a job waitressing in a local restaurant. Being sensible she saves up her money so she is ready for a new life at uni in 6 months time as she is determined to do something worth-while with her life.

Ella

Ella has been learning to drive for the past 3 months and just passed her test on the day of the party. She can be quite temperamental and often has mood swings. Her dad left her mum when she was 12 years old and since then she finds trusting people difficult, except the girls.