Love Actually - Pre production

We were given a piece of script and 2 weeks to film and edit this scene. We needed a cast, location, costume and a storyboard. A date to film and enough time to edit our footage. As a group we decided to all help out instead of allocating roles. We brainstormed locations and people for a our cast and then set out jobs to do before next lesson. After this we discussed a date of when we were all available for filming.

Location - In the movie the scene is set at 10 downing street, as we don't have access to that we chose a manor, grand house which would be believable as the prime minsters house. I looked up similar locations and found several hall/hotels which suited what we wanted, I phoned up Caistor hall to see if they would be happy for us to film on their location, however they never replied. So we also tried Park Farm they also didn't get back with in our deadline. So we ended up asking friends who had a suitable house whether we could use their house, one of them agreed so we had a location.

Cast - As a group we found cast rather hard because it was hard to set a date without knowing the location and time and people had to be available on short notice. So we decided to properly cast the PM and Natalie as these people needed to have more acting experience. For the rest of the cast we decided see who was available at the time because they only had a few lines therefore didn't need great acting skills. Ed was our PM because his personality fitted with the character in the script, and Libby as our Natalie because she is a good actor and she also fitted quite well as innocent, nervous Natalie. Me and Kate had to fill in the other parts as Annie and Pat because people were not available
and dropped out at the last minute.

For costume, I ask Ed to wear a smart black suit, to appear like a prime minister. Libby, me and Kate all wore smart looking clothes, white blouses. We didn't need to worry about bottom half because it was never on camera.

Love Actually - Production

We decided to start with the PM coming out of a car to show he just arrived at his house. We did a low shot of the car door opening and his feet stepping out the car, and then we continued it with a moving shot of Ed doing up his jacket and adjusting his tie. Next shot was at the door and match on action of Ed walking up to the door waving and from the other side of the door him coming through. We plan to edit in crowd sound effect afterwards, we found a mixture of different sound effects online to download and blended them together to make it more realistic. As he entered we faded out the sound effects but only cut them off when the door closed.

Throughout the whole thing we added a de-noisier and changed the brightness especially inside which was rather dark we also had another person holding a light on set to make the scene brighter. We did two shot/reverse shot for the two conversations between pat and the PM and Natalie and the PM, this meant we could clearly hear their lines and got a close up of their faces to capture their facial expressions. We only had a small section of corridor to film in so we did separate shots using the same section of wall. We did a few takes because of things like looking at the camera and had to skip Terence because we didn't have enough actors, as well as the end because the camera ran out of charge but you cant really notice and it doesn't look like its been cut off before the end. We had planned to do these bits in front of the green screen but we didn't have a lot of time. We played around we lighting in editing and volume level. I would have preferred a plainer location because stuff in the background could be distracting.