Pre Production Unit - Location Recce: London

Since I was looking at London for a lot of locations to film for the project, I felt it would be really important to do a recce in all of the locations I was thinking about filming in. We decided to take a trip up to central London and have a look around based on practicallity and to ensure the visuals were accurate enough for the shoot. The first place we visited was Piccadilly Circus. You can see a photo I took below:

This location I feel represented completely what I had in my head. It was vibrant and fairly busy but not so busy that we wouldnt be able to film. I stood in many different positions around the location looking at all the angles and walking through with Andreya all the different types of shots I was picturing for the scene. We spent a good hour going through all the different types of things we could do here and its been a real insight to how the film would end up looking.

The next location we moved on to was the financial district. This is the area of london thats home to all of the london banks and where all the big corporations are housed. Its also got some of Londons most Iconic Landmarks like The Gherkin and The Leadenhall Building. You can see a few photos I took below:

This place took up a lot of our time, purely by the fact that its so big. There are many different streets and avenues that have differernt angles of all the buildings. We took our time looking around in many different positions to find where the best angles were and what was going to work well in terms of the film. One of the best places we stumbled on was a square that you can see in the first picture of the three. You can see its a great open space amongst the arcutecture that surrounds it. There is also a lot of corporations around the square with a lot of people wearing business atire and this is exactly the place I feel the film needs. The other place was right by the Gherkin. There was a great street that was formal and very pleasing to the eye with the large building towering above. This is somewhere I can really see us using.

The final place we looked at was Chelsea. Since we were running out of time due spending so much time at the other two places, we had to prioritise and I felt that the Chelsea location was really important as I wanted to make sure the place was going to look right. You can see a photo I took below:

I was worried that when we got there the streets were going to be really busy in terms of traffic meaning it might be quite difficult to get the shots I was thinking about. It was busy when we got off the tube but as we went more residential it seemed to get a lot less busy. We found a nice road that I feel would work perfectly and walked up and down it to see what would look best. I also saw more creativity in how some shots could be done like on the other side of the road and even further back in the square behind. This location will be perfect for the scene I'm thinking of.

Overall the location recce was really worth doing. It was really good to visit each of the locations and spend some time there seeing how certain shots could be done and working out the practicalities of where the camera would go. I feel this has prepared me well for shooting and has confirmed a lot of things which now allow me to move onto the next step of getting permissions for all these places.