In this post I will be justifying why the locations we as a production team have chosen are suitable and also why even though some locations might look ideal but practically they are not so good for filming.
The location of the Hacker's house is not in a 'rough' looking area as his character may portray at times but more your typical house in a typical area. Our film is about a Hacker and his family who have been hit badly by the economic crisis and this is portrayed in our location since although they have a house there are no cars on the drive indicating that perhaps the family had to sell them for money.
We chose to use the kitchen as the location for inside the house so that we could portray that this is a typical house with evidence that people are living in it. For example you can see a newspaper, bowls and glasses left on the side showing that they have been recently used. Our hacker sits in the kitchen on their laptop whilst drinking from a glass and so would make the authenticity of the house more realistic rather than a plain room which shows us that the house is used. Also the kitchen provides a back door for our hacker to flee from making it an ideal location to film from.
The approach to the house enables us to build up tension by filming our antagonist walking down the road towards the house allowing us to also use a range of camera angles to portray this but most importantly it shows the audience exactly where our film is taking place which is a residential area. It also shows the audience that the hacker is still living with their parents since someone of the hackers age would not own a house of that size.
For the running scene we identified two sections of streets to be used to film our protagonist running and our antagonist walking. However the first location (below left)
looks ideal however in terms of shooting the film here the ascending hill will make filming a steady dolly shot fairly tricky where as the second location (Right) provides more of a flat surface but also a transition of an environment showing the audience that our protagonist is leaving the residential area and coming to a different location showing the audience that they have travelled from one place to another.
For the confrontation between our protagonist and antagonist we chose a more darker, plainer scenery to raise the tension of the story. The location we decided for this was some garages and an a adjacent alley way for the confrontation setting a sinister mood that the audience will see that something bad is going to happen since the scenery has moved from the tidy built up housing area to some old ill maintained garages and a dark alley way.
How these compare to real movie locations
In comparison to the house in our location research to the house out of the film Transformers which features a similar aged protagonist, the two houses are generally the same. Both are detached indicating to the audience that the protagonist is still living with their parents since they would not be able to afford a house of that size at their age, neither would they maintain the plants in the gardens showing to the audience that this is their parents house.
The features of the alley way seen in our location research to the alley way seen in the film Quadrophenia both share similar characteristics. Such as the alley way in both pictures is narrow and confined and also leads to another location. Both alley ways are ideal confrontation locations since they leave the protagonist no where to run. Also they are both dark and untidy sticking to the hegemonic ideology that alley ways are dark, confined spaces which is exactly what these two alley ways are.
