Directions | The Shoot

I spent the weeks leading up to the shoot very nervous and worried that I would not be able to produce something worth the effort I had put into it, largely because of the issues I had with locations.  However on the morning of the shoot, I awoke with a nervous optimism about the whole thing.

I left home at 9:00 to pick up Will from Maidstone so he could work as my sound operator and assistant camera operator; then Aidan, my lead actor, so we would arrive at the first filming location for 10:15.  My sister and lead runner, Nikki, was already on location in Dartford and had already arranged the room as I needed it to film our scenes - this saved us a lot of time and allowed us to crack on with filming earlier than planned.

We began by shooting some of Aidan's (playing Rick Grimes) close-up and mid shots when he is in the bed before taking a break whilst we waited for the other actor, Darrell (playing Shane Walsh).  He arrived shortly after we expected him at 12:15 and we got straight into shooting.  Darrell was very nice to work with and he responded well with my directing.  We took about 8 takes from various angles and wrapped Darrell's scene within an hour - I also asked him to record some audio for an alternate opening I thought about the night before shooting which involved a blank white screen as voices called out for Rick after he has been shot to give us a better indication of the relationship between the characters and Rick's circumstances for being in hospital.

I paid for Darrell's travel expenses which totalled £19.40, rounding to £20 for convenience and he was on his way shortly after 1:00.  We then filmed Aidan's scenes after Rick wakes up, meaning switching from shooting on the DSLR to the Sony XDCAM.  We started by recording audio through the XDCAM, as the DSLR does not have an input for the Rode mic and recording through the Rode mic on the XDCAM would make the audio fit together better in the edit.

After the dream/hallucination sequence was complete, Nikki applied a small amount of makeup to Aidan to make him look more tired and dishevelled, and also sprayed some water on his face so he looked sweaty after waking up.  This was a small and subtle detail but I felt it was important to make Rick look rough due to the situation he has found himself in.

Part of this scene involved filming in a very small bathroom, but I was surprised and pleased with how much still fit in the frame.  This scene did not take long to film and we quickly moved on to shoot Rick falling out of the bed and calling for the nurse.  We realised that picking a suitable angle to shoot from would be tricky due to the limitations with space so we rehearsed the exact manner at which Aidan would fall to the floor that was both believable, practical, and did not show any of the set that we did not want in shot.

We wrapped filming in Dartford around 17:00 and headed back to my house (via Dartford Train Station to pick up Sophie, who was playing the corpse) to do some makeup and have some food before we went to a block of flats in Maidstone to shoot the corridor and stairwell scenes.  Unfortunately, we were only allowed to shoot from 19:00 onwards which limited us a great deal.  However we made the most of what time we had and were able to work through almost all of the shot list.

Upon arrival at the flats in Maidstone, we quickly set up the practical effects for the corpse scene.  This meant lying Sophie on the floor wearing the bloodied hospital gown, and then covering her and the fake entrails in fake blood - we ensured that none would spill onto the carpet by putting a towel and dog training pad underneath the hospital gown.  This was very effective and prevented any spillage onto the carpet.

The rest of the shoot did not go as well as the morning did, largely due to constraints with time and space: each corridor and stairwell looked exactly the same, so we were limited to how different we could make the scenes look, and we could only shoot until 22:00 - meaning we would be shooting about a third more of the script in half as much time as we had in the morning.  Nevertheless, we soldiered on and recorded all the scenes needed.