Location Recce

The attic is the main location of our film. We love the whole look of the attic. There are so many different elements that make it the perfect set for our opening sequence. Referring to Barthes Code Theory, the attic will leave the audience with plenty of semantic codes. These our vital considering the first thing the audience will see is Anastasia in the attic.

They will need some clues as to what is going on, even if they cannot make complete sense of it all. The dirty and broken floor boards will tell the audience that Anastasia is in a bad place and she is in danger because the connotations of dirtiness and broken objects are that things are not right.

 There are also cobwebs all over the windows and in the broken floorboards, which will give the audience a sense of fear, due to the association of cobwebs to spiders. An animal in which many people fear. It also gives the impression that the attic has been untouched for a very long time and that it is not usually used or visited by people, giving the hint that Anastasia is being kept away from others.













We will also have a scene of Anastasia in her bedroom. This will be to show the audience that the scene in the attic was a flash forward to the 'disruption' and that the film will now return to the 'equilibrium' and will now follow Todorov's narrative theory, whereby the plot is set out in the following order:

• Equilibrium
• Disruption
• Resolution 
• New equilibrium

The location that we have chosen for Anastasia's bedroom is my actual bedroom. We felt this was the perfect place to do it as my bedroom is predominantly covered in light colours. The walls and carpet are a very light grey. All the furniture is white. Having a lot of light colours, especially white, signifies Anastasia's purity and innocence. It shows the audience that she is a good character, which needs to be established following the first scene because she is very dirty and heart. She is also in a dark and dirty location so some of the audience may misinterpret her as what Propp would refer to as the 'Antagonist' because these are usually the connotions associated to a bad character. The second location will reassure the audience as to the fact that she is a good character and present her as another character role from Propp's character theory: the 'Prince/Prize' because they will see how she was in trouble in the first scene and in the second scene they will see that she is actually a innocent and desired character. We provided the text from Dylan our protagonist as an action code, to hint to the character that he is her rescuer and that she is desired by the male characters. There are also big mirrors to give the audience the impression that she takes care in her appearence and cares about how she looks to others. There are also cosmetics lying around her room such as: makeup, perfumes etc. These again show the audience how she take care of her appearence. Suggesting to the audience that she could be quite a popular girl in school, as often teenagers who are classed as popular are often stereotypically labelled as being vain and egotistic. 

There will then be a very short moment when you see Anastasia and Damien walking down the street outside. This was the road that I live down. There are lots of trees down my road and as it is winter they are all bare of leaves which really helped give that eerie affect. It is also a fairly quiet road so there was no by passers, which really helped hint to the audience that Damien was going to keep Anastasia away from the rest of the world and that very soon she would only have his company. 

All these locations were either near my house or in my house so they were extremely easy to access and there was no trouble in finding the ideal place. 

There was so members of the public that interfered whilst filming the scene outside, therefore we did not have to ask anyone for permission to film there or ask people to avoid the shot. However when filming in my house, my family were often very loud and it was heard to film and not get the sound of them talking etc. in the shot, especially my 4 year-old niece who kept crying and interrupting our filming. However luckily we didn't want to include any usual dialogue or sounds and we edited in all non-diegetic and diegetic sounds afterwards. 

The only way to get in to my attic is by a very shaky and unstable ladder, which was quite dangerous especially when taking things like lamps and the camera equipment up and down. To overcome this the boys went up first and then me and Sophie handed up anything we needed to take up and followed up after them. We also had to be very careful where we stood because there were nails on the floor and some of the floorboards we broken. We used the nails to our advantage and included it in our opening sequence as a prop. However there was not really anything particular that we could do with the broken floorboards, we just ensured that we avoided standing near them or in them. We also included shots of these in the opening sequence to really emphasise how much danger Anastasia is in.