Research and Planning: How Our Filming Went

Yesterday, (on the 4th of February 2012) we filmed the opening 2 minutes of 'Recurrence'. It went really well as we got it all done in one day and it came out as well as we'd hoped it would. We did change a few things when we got to the location as we felt that it would look better for the places that we had to do the filming in. We had a few things that we had to change because there were builders at the house we were using but we managed to avoid them being in the shots.


In the first part, set 80 years ago, we really wanted it to look realistic so that the audience actually felt like they were in the 1930's. We used the oldest looking room in the house and made sure there was nothing modern in there. We used costume, lighting and location in order to do this. Rebecca Atkinson, who played the girl in the beginning, wore a long white, laced/silk dress which we chose because we thought it helped with producing a feeling of it being back in the 30's. We turned the lights off and only had light coming through the stained glass windows on the door and the candles that were lit on the floor. I think we managed to create a feeling of creepiness in this scene because we really tried hard in the planning stage to make sure that we had everything covered in making sure that it looked realistic.


We had to make changes to the last part where Lara Allgood's Dad was meant to say "Put the box on the hallway table" and "I thought I told you to put it on the table" and Lara's reply should have been "But I did...". The reason we changed this was because we thought of a few shots that we could use, in order to be able to show a variation of different shots in the opening 2 minutes. We also thought that the new shots made it more interesting to watch and made it creepier.

When filming the outside scenes, there were some unwanted diegetic sounds that we couldn't really do anything about. When editing, we will get rid of these sounds in order for the clip to sound authentic when the final opening 2 minutes is done. When editing, we will also use some non-diegetic sounds in order for the opening 2 minutes to feel creepy and sounds that will fit with the genre. We don't want to make it sound ridiculous or fake, so I think we will use more discreet and understated non-diegetic sounds.


With the planning and research that helped us to plan the opening 2 minutes to 'Recurrence', I hope we managed to create believeable scenes that feel creepy to watch. We are all excited to start editing and hopefully have it finished soon.