Character Profiles within Epidemic

Character Profiles within Epidemic

I am going to talk about the characters that we created within this film. I am going to evaluate how each individual character contributed to the project and how that made this as good as it can possibly be. The group came up with 7 characters in total. Three of them are zombies and the other three are main characters which take part in questioning one’s existence. I am going to evaluate the positives and negatives of each person and then speak about why we made these characters in the way we intended. 

David Potter

This character wakes up from a coma in a hospital bed, not knowing what has occurred. He wakes up in the traumatic times of the zombie Apocalypse and this doesn’t summarise until he realises why everything is so quiet and derelict. This character then meets two other characters who attack him to suspend him, to make sure that he isn’t hostile and dangerous. The wounds here are created from the surgery and the attack in which another character hits him in the head with a baseball bat.

Why did we create this character?
This character is the main character and we did this so we can see from a perspective of someone just joining in on the post-apocalyptic story. This needs David Potter’s point of view so this is why we created many POV shots of how he sees the environment around him. This was done to create realistic and fragile state of mind also. This character throughout the sequence shows a silent and resilient aspect, as he doesn’t want people to know information about him. He doesn’t even know what’s happened himself, so the brutality that is caused by the other two characters shows intentional questionability to what’s happening. 

The clothing and make-up on this character tried to look as realistic as possible through as little money and budget as we had. We used fake blood in attempt to show damage to the person’s body. The clothing inside the scenes show that he has just woken up from an operation as he still had an operation gown on. I won’t delve too much into the clothing as that is for another post. 

Sarah 

Sarah is the main girl character in our film and is very powerful, especially in the decisions she has to face. Sarah has a best friend called Steve and despite being the woman, Sarah is the decision maker, the one in charge and the most mentally strong. Even though her partner Steve is physically strong, between the both of them Sarah is the most strong as she can keep herself together and has something inside her that makes her perfect for this new world. She still has lots of fear as fear is what keeps her good and what keeps her alive. Inside she is terrified of the world around her but can compose herself very well in front of the zombies and the humans. This is because of Sarah’s background. Sarah pre apocalypse was just an average girl in an office job. She was an interview manager for a secretive Government company called Blume. Blume were a company that recruited and trained military like men who came into action when big events happened such as terrorist threats, riots or situations the police were just not equipped to deal with. The men were trained by ex military men and had any weapons they wanted because of the fact it was a government run company it had lots of money. Which was quite good pay being that the company was secretive, but despite this Sarah didn’t like her job. The company recruited men that were mentally and physically strong and had the best of the best therefore in the interviewing process had to be put to the test and challenged. Sarah was in charge of the interviewing of new employees and had to make sure she got the best of the best, therefore her job was hard as she couldn’t just pick random people she had to have the best on offer. The interviewing process meant that Sarah had to ask deep personal questions to the men she interviewed and she always had the best background knowledge on her interviewee’s. A thing Sarah struggled with was the fact that there were no women that were allowed to apply as the company wanted it done a strict way and statistically men handled the situations better than women. Because Sarah was such a strong woman she struggled with the fact there were no women allowed and protested against this. This was just before the apocalypse happened.  

Why did we create this character?
We created this character because we originally wanted a girl in the group. We constructed that we should allow a girl in the cast because then we can build a relationship on her with David or Steve. This would also be good for the story to branch into the stereotypical ‘The Last Girl’ which is a core convention of horror films. We knew that we could expand on this character in the ways that we did. This character has a lot of potential for us to make the plot so much better with the ideas that could be in the feature-length film. Nothing much happens in the 3 minute sequence that we created however it does show that she’s very selfish as she runs out the room where zombies try and overcrowd, without trying to save Steve or David.

Steve

Steve is the brains of the three main characters. We intended for Steve to be very wise in what is happening, he doesn’t have much going for him in the film apart from him being very defensive and has an attacking trait on him. 

Why did we create this character?
We wanted Steve to be bit in the end, as this creates a fatality and strikes the group to be as tense as possible. We wanted the death to be a key point, but we also wanted him to be wise, without someone being wise within a group, it can create upset and potentially more deaths or emergencies.  

News Reporter

This character doesn’t do much apart from attempt to broadcast news to the viewers. This character is used to establish the scene. This establishes the film and the scenes that occur.

Overview of our Filming Day

When deciding to film we wanted to make it as easy as possible for us to not break continuity, so when discussing where, when and how we want to film we said we wanted to film it all in one day, that way it would be easier for us not to break continuity, however this means that we had to put a lot of effort into the planning of the day and we did. We made a call sheet for the day (can be seen in a previous post) and  that said we had to start at 1pm and we had to have everything ready before.

We printed off 5 scripts, one for each actor and two for the crew. We had already previously bought the ingredients for the blood and the costumes so we located ourselves a ‘Base Room’ and set up in there. First off we had to get Darren ready as he was on set first at 1:30pm. His costume wasn’t that complicated, it was just a hospital robe with bandages. We bandaged him and wanted to make his chest wound look like it hadn’t been treated in a while to keep up with the story that he has been abandoned in the hospital for like a month. We thought the best way to do this was to make it bloody. We then made the first batch of blood whilst Darren got dressed and then we placed the blood behind the bandage to look like it had seeped through but we also put it on the outside of the bandage because it didn’t look right at first and the blood didn’t fully come through but after we applied it to the outside of the bandage it looked so much better. Once we found this had worked effectively we applied a second bandage to Darrens arm just to make the point hi is injured stand out a bit more.

Once Darren was ready for set we went to the location of filming. This was the Hair and Beauty room in college. The reason we picked out this room was because it most resembled a hospital as stated in our location of filming post. It took us longer than expected to get the room sorted to our liking, taking out any objects that didn’t belong, making the beds covering anything that wouldn’t look right in the scene and even setting up the first shot. This was all unexpected as we have no previous experience of setting up a film set or prepping the shots but this didn’t put us that far behind, we were only roughly 15 minutes behind schedule, which didn’t at this minute pose any major problems.

We looked at the shot list we printed off and we set up the camera for the first shot but due to the fact none of us had done this before we all checked the first shot was to our liking and ultimately like the shot list. We checked it against our view of what the shot would look like in our sort of mental floor plan and we were satisfied that the shot was good enough and we started filming. For the first 5 shots we did at least 4 takes for each shot just to make sure we covered the basics and we were all constantly checking the takes were right and spot on for what we wanted. Callum, Ellis and Tom all operated the camera, Callum for the more moving shots and we were all constantly making sure that Darren was in the right place. We wanted to do this as a team and although we should have really had one official director we all wanted to make sure that we were on a mutual agreement with the shots and the camera angles. This was because this was the first time any of us had properly filmed, some of us had experience on film sets but none of us had ever done it ourselves.

Whilst we were filming Becky (playing Sarah) and Jack (playing Steve) were getting ready and due to the fact all of us were constantly retaking shots and checking the shots were right we had fallen more behind which was a problem now. This is when we decided we were doing something wrong and decided we needed one director and one assistant director. It was at this moment that the rest of the cast and crew turned up so Tom and Ellis went to sort costumes and make sure everyone knew what they were doing, what time they were on set and what to expect. This was a real big help as whilst Callum and Darren were filming still checking the shots were right (however not as much due to how far behind we were), Tom and Ellis were sorting everyone else out and by the time Callum and Darren finished filming inside the hair and beauty room everyone else was ready and that made everything so much easier.

We started filming the next part now with Becky and Jack and Ellis became the camera operator along with Darren (for the POV shots) whilst Callum and Tom were directing Becky and Jack. We personally feel that having a second head there visualising how the scene would look was very helpful and got it done so much quicker. We began filming this scene but couldn’t quite do it right. The scene was supposed to be Becky running in front of Jack and then Becky hits Darren with the baseball bat but she couldn’t do it. Each time she wasn’t violent enough or ended up laughing which was quite funny when we were there but we knew we were behind time and something had to be done. Darren suggested the idea of changing the storyline from Becky swinging the bat to Jack swinging the bat. I was very wary at first as we were reluctant to change this but we knew it had to be done and had to be done fast if we wanted to finish the rest of the film. So from this we changed the story so Jack swings the bat and it worked much better and we got that done in a few takes and it looked really good.

By this time we were still behind time but we allocated a break into the call sheet which was 30 minutes long but we could cut it down. We wanted to give everyone a break because we pushed everyone hard the first few hours. Once we removed everything that needed to be removed and set up the camera and got the rest of the cast and crew but by this time other than us four most of the cast had lost motivation so we had to get everyone motivated again which wasn’t that hard and then we got back filming again. Because the room was so small not everyone could fit in so we only got the cast, Callum and Tom started filming Darren whilst Ellis sorted everything outside and letting everyone know what was happening. For this scene we had many different takes and angles and wanted to cover everything and we did add a few other shots that weren’t in the shot list just because we wanted to try new things but we all agreed and continued filming this scene again and again in different ways. We had many bloopers and things that went wrong which was very good for motivation as it kept everyone happier that we were having fun doing this however because we had so much to film it was taking a long time and people were getting bored so we decided to finish of this scene and we were happy with what we covered. During the interrogation Tom left to help Ellis get the zombies ready and that was good because we focused on the scene whilst they were busy. By the time we finished that part of the scene the zombies were ready and we didn’t want to waste time so went straight away to film their part which went quite well but they didn’t really know what to do. We didn’t know what to tell them as we have no previous experience of acting as a zombie so we just went back to what we knew about the general conventions and what we had researched and just gave them simple instructions about limping etc. Because It was only the zombies. In this scene Callum and Darren were directing together and we were all happy with the outcome.

After filming the zombie part we had to film the scene where the zombies rush into the room and when the three characters run out of the room. Because there were so many people we found it hard to do this scene and struggling for time unfortunately we didn’t get enough shots or at least as much as we wanted but everyone was a bit hectic and bored and wanted to go home. It was late by now so we knew we had to get it finished. This may not have been the best idea but it’s the idea we went with. After fiming the last scene where they run out everyone was still in costume so we did it as normal but we got it good every take and we were happy with what we did. The last shot of the camera falling over most people had left and it took a few takes but we finally finished. We then cleared up dropped the camera back off and we were going to sort the clips out the next day but we left the set and we were very happy we managed to get everything filmed in that day.

Looking at what we did we feel that we made a few bad decisions such as the messing about with the first scene doing so many takes and checking so many times but we weren’t to know. It was our first time filming and we had to keep that in mind and not be hard on ourselves. But next time we will get straight on it and if we film again, maybe next year we would do a lot differently such as checking the shots again and again, we would not do that we'll just trust our guts (no pun intended) and have more confidence in the shots we filmed. In terms of moral we felt that we should have done more to keep everyone happy because by the end all the cast and crew were tired and wanted to go home. So next time we will put more breaks in the day of filming so that people are happier and can relax more. In terms of the zombie flooding scene we were quite unhappy with as we didn’t get all the shots we wanted which was annoying because with more time and preparation we might have but it’s done now and what we have is of a good standard so it’s not that much of a problem. So to answer the question, was filming all the shots in one day successful? We think so and we think it would have been much worse and much more hectic if we would have filmed over a few days. But saying this, it did have it’s problems and next time we know how to tackle those problems and make filming much more smoother and successful!