AS Media Maidstone Location Scouting Practical

Maidstone Location Scouting Practical

Brief

For our film opening we would like to include many stereotypical urban areas like the back of shop fronts etc. As we are all familiar with Maidstone I decided to scout for locations in this chosen area. Other locations will be taken in London, where locations are identifiable and conform to common conventions. I have also chosen to not focus on the conventions like shop fronts etc. due to the availability and instead chose to focus on finding other locations.

As our protagonist is a young homeless girl, as a group we chose to create sympathy by making her seem vulnerable. This helped us devise a plot that the girl's parents have died. Consequently, to create sympathy we have chosen scenes of the girl watching families and her visiting her parent's graves. So, for this location practical I have decided to scout for graveyards and locations associated to families, like parks.

We have also had the idea of including the theme of Christmas subtly, which is usually when family is praised. However, if we relied too much on this it would make the film lose its raw reality on homelessness and would make it seem 'cheesy', and perhaps even unprofessional.

Production

For this practical I wanted to see if the church and graveyard beside Archbishop's Palace was a suitable location. On my way, however, I came across a park in Tovil. This locations would allow us to film the park scenes in the montage if it is suitable. The photos below were taken at 07:00 in the morning. The lighting was fairly poor and so I had to use the flash.

Due to the darkness, it made the park look incredibly creepy and would actually make the film appear to be a horror, this is enforced by the woodland settings, which is not appropriate to the urban conventions, despite the council houses and railway behind the river. On the other hand, the darkness and the coldness would make us feel sorry for the character and emphasise their isolation.

On my route to the church, I also found desolate areas and the backs of warehouses which we could use instead of shop fronts where there may be too many people walking by. Although, we wish to use busy urban locations to show how despite there being so many people, the homeless character is being overlooked, making her seem weak and worthless, these locations can show remoteness and isolation. So, we could use the shop fronts for some shots like a time lapse of people walking by. Hence, we could replace some urban locations to the following locations and could add non diegetic noises usually heard like cars, people walking and sirens to make the locations seem busy. These photos were also taken around 07:00, but stretched on till 07:30.

Below are the photos of the church graveyard. The graves are incredibly old, therefore I plan to not use this location as it is unsuitable to the plot's context.

On the other hand, As shown this location backs onto a busy road that leads into Maidstone Town Centre. We could use this to still show that the character is in an urban area, but perhaps muffle the sound of the cars to present this hard hitting and significant scene as a contrast to the busy urban noises we would use in a montage of clips that represent homelessness, urban areas and the park.

Below are some other locations I found possibly suitable to the opening in Maidstone Town Centre. This include another graveyard, but the graves are still old and back onto a wall preventing us from panning from behind graves or use establishing shots from behind the graves.