Creating Cribsheets

In class today, to kick off the second term, we learned about location crib-sheets and constructed some of our own. We got given a brief of a film to produce - a period romantic comedy, about zombies. With this, a camera, tripod and a collection of crib sheets, we went to three different places in Bath.


Green park was our first location.




The pictures to the right show the natural shots we got of this area. However, in the first shot, you can see a line of cars in the traffic. This shows just how close the road is to the park, and how if you pan too much, then you'll catch something on camera you don't want - at least for a periodic film.


Despite the traffic and modernised area, we did manage to get a couple of shots, which had mostly natural surroundings and that we thought that could be used for a periodic film. For filming, however, it will be a lot harder unless we film without moving the camera at all.


We also took images (like below) including some different shots, using objects like benches and certain hedges. I think this was effective, and seemed quite romantic also. However, one flaw would be that if we raised the camera, we would've caught the park equipment in the background, which is too modern for our brief.



Using these pictures, and our own surrounding at the time, we put together a crib sheet for Green Park.

You can see it below.

In the crib sheet, we looked at the levels of noise, obstructions and popularity. In this location, there were a few children and dog walkers, but there were sheltered and secluded areas of the park. In the main issue we had was fitting the scenery with our brief, as, like I mentioned before, there was a lot of modern things, like swing sets, slides and construction sites.

Overall, there were some good areas to shoot, but they were small and limited.


The next location we looked at was Norfok Crescent.

 Here it was a bit more complicated to find a place to shoot, because it was basically a field with a row of houses around it, but we did find a small slope where you could see the top of the house (first image). However, it was very dark because of the shade of the trees, and it had an eerie feel to it - despite the houses - which soft of lined to our brief.

However, as you can see from the next picture, there were a lot of cars, and this ruined the look of the entire setting, especially as the cars didn't fit the 'period style' film, and added traffic noise to the area.

Below, is the crib sheet we made for this location.

Overall, we said it was a pretty area and had not many people around, which makes it a lot easier to film, but there were lots of cars and not much area to actually film without coming across an obstacle like a car, or sign, etc.

We, also, said that if we wanted to film there that there would be an issue with finding sheltered areas for costume/makeup, as there were no 'corners' in this field out of shot from the filming.

The last location was the Royal Crescent.


Here, there was a bandstand which looked authentic, and could be used in romantic scenes. We decided that this would be suitable for our brief, and took some wide shots of the bandstand, and the area surrounding it. We also took an 'over-the-shoulder' shot, which could be a possible shot we could use for our filming.


 With the fallen leaves and contrasting green grass, this location was extremely pretty, and the only fault we could find was having a hard time associating zombies to the area. However, after a quick brainstorm, I realised that we could just use a certain time of day - like sunset or night time - to set a more eerie mood if we wanted to.


We also captured images of the houses along the Crescent. Sure, there were some cars but it was a lot less than the previous locations, and you could get them out of shot easily. The final image you see, you can see the tall houses and some cars. I didn't really like this part of the location and preferred the other two images we had captured at the Royal Crescent.

This final crib sheet shows that we liked this location the most, but there were still downsides. For instance, it was a lot busier as there was a park next to it, so there were a lot of locals, dog-walkers, children and mostly tourists. Also, it was very posh and grand, so it was hard to link to the zombie brief we had, but perfect for our romantic theme.

Overall, we still preferred this area to the others and I think the crib sheets were a very helpful way of remembering and dissecting the data and information we had collected.