Portrait of Place: Edale

Right in the heart of the Peak District is the very small village of Edale, which was set to be the location for our 3 minute film. Creativity was key for Portrait of Place, allowing us to create almost anything that we wanted. At first it was difficult planning a narrative and shot ideas for somewhere I have not even heard of, let alone seen. After some careful research, me and my partner Joeley began to brainstorm some ideas... Most Joeley's idea, I won't attempt to steal any credit, we settled on the story of an Edale stone. It's journey through the village and how it gets dispositioned by everyday life - we thought this would be an interesting concept. My role involved turning an idea into something filmable (if that's a word). As the group member with filming experience I planned some shot ideas and how I thought we could show it's journey most effectively.

Me filming in the rain at Edale - it was just as
important to keep both the camera and my hat
dry.

On production day, we walked around and found a beautiful river, with a small waterfall and a bridge. We experimented with different angles to try and create something dynamic and experimental. One great idea was to have the stone going down the waterfall and into a pipe, which connects it to the river. This shot was based purely on luck and good timing. When looking back at the footage we thought this worked very well, and we slowed it down slightly to emphasise it's success. We got many different types of shots and were really happy with our footage, now we just need to edit it all together!

*UPDATE
Now all the footage has been edited we've realised that we should have done more filming on the day. Because the edited is so precise, it meant the running time is a lot shorter than we intended. This has taught us to shot more footage than we need just in case, we could have done some general shots of stones in different places that could use if we needed to. In the end we are happy with our film, it's not perfect, but the narrative makes sense are shows what we wanted it to.