Shooting Location

This is an updated and better version of this post. However I compiled this post together myself but some material from previous post is still relevant such as maps, but we had a change of plans since that original post was post, see here.

This is the farm on which we shot our thriller (exterior view)

The exterior as you can see of the building is a mess and it gives the abandoned look to it which is what we were striving to create in our initial planning stages. Other Thriller movies such as 'The Abandoned' have featured a similar feel to their location as it was set in an abandoned house, see below for a capture of the setting:

The Abandoned, featuring the abandoned house

Other thrillers and some horror films have featured this theme of setting, example include Blair Witch Project, 28 Days Later and I am Legend. However most of these have generally captured a larger area for example in 28 Days Later the whole of London (pictured below) was abandoned due to a virus. 

28 Days Later, abandoned London

The feeling that the abandonment gives it, really emphasises the single characters isolation in the fairly compact area and this is often a good thriller techniques as they like to use the theme of isolation throughout movies such as the psychological thriller, Frozen (pictured below) and you can see that this also shows the poor use of light also a very often used technique in Thrillers.

Frozen, 3 main characters isolated and alone on ski resort

This is what had a lot of influence on me to shoot in a location such as we did and luckily after the second shoot it worked out well for us and I am pleased with where we shot it and although it doesn't really challenge thriller conventions apart from the fact it's on a farm, it does however as I have shown, conform to them.

Interior View of our shooting location in the barn

The interior was the place where we shot the majority of the video and as you can see from the picture above, it wasn't quite abandoned but it gave the feeling of poor up-keeping and lack of use and this was perfect for us because a lot of the camera angles we used whilst shooting attempted to not show the areas that hinted at obvious use, but apart from this, I don't think that we could have picked a better location for our storyboard.

The barn was full of cobwebs and it was very filthy which allowed me to capture opening footage such as:

which is featured at the very opening of the title sequence. The mess that was inside added to the overall final effect of the video and it looked really great with the rough feel to it which Thriller films of the kind often feature, i.e. Blair Witch Project.