The Location

As a group, we decided that the best place to film the beach scene would be Sandbay, as it's fairly secluded and has a woods right by it, which is the perfect setting for our thriller opening sequence. After walking round the beach, we found a spot that was sheltered on one side by the trees with the beach on the other side of it.

When we come to film we'll set the group up around the fire, facing away from the woods. We'll have to be careful to film from certain angles, as in the background there is a road and at another angle to the left you can see a car park. Luckily as we're planning to film in the afternoon/early evening this shouldn't be a problem as there aren't many cars that go past which would ruin the secluded and isolated feeling we're trying to create.

One issue we realised when we got there was that there is quite a lot of wind, which shouldn't affect the shots too much as bad weather is one of the classic conventions of a thriller. However the wind and the sound of the sea is likely to affect the natural sound and dialogue of the characters chatting to each other in the background, as well as the music and the guitar in the shots. In the area we chose to use (shown above) the wind wasn't too bad as it's stopped mostly by the trees. Also, as we're planning to have mostly mid shots and close ups hopefully are characters will be heard. When it comes to filming and editing we're going to see if we can find a way to enhance the sound incase the noise on the beach does become an issue.

Below is a quick test footage so we could see what the sound would be like when filming, as well as giving us the ability to see what the area would look like on film.

This was shot on a Fujifilm Finepix S4000

We then looked for our second location to film for the end part of our opening sequence. We decided to look at the woods by Sandbay, as being right by our first location it would be the easiest place to film. However we couldn't find a part of the woods that wasn't near the road, was flat enough to film, or was built up enough to create the isolated feel that we wanted for our film, creating the effect that no one can rescue the character and that they are entirely on their own.  

Because of this we decided to use another location for the woods. To make it seem like the other woods  is the one behind the beach we plan to use shots from both woods, matching the shots of the Sandbay woods with our other location so it doesn't seem obvious they are different places completely. To help this we plan to get audio of the natural sound from the woods near Sandbay and gradually fade it out of the shots from the location, creating an eerie silence for the final part of our opening sequence.

Our Second location is Worlebury Woods. This is better than Sandbay Woods because it's denser and creates the isolated and secluded feel much better than Sandbay. It's also the perfect location for the woods scene because it's a lot flatter as a whole, and there's a lot less background noise, which again build up that eerie sense we were trying to create.

As for the specific place in the woods to film the scene, we decided it would be better to find this on the actual day of filming, as there are a lot of place in the woods that would be perfect, but it's such a big woods that even if we did find a specific place the chances are we won't be able to find it again.