More Location Troubles

In the therapy session, as the patient speaks, we intended for the film to make brief cutaways to his life at home (which incidentally takes place in a seemingly derelict house), where the visuals will contradict what the patient says during the session. In order to film this scene, we needed to find some kind of run-down building; the famous abandoned Hallam Towers quickly springing to mind. We headed down there on the day of shooting, only to discover that the police were in the area. Upon further inspection, we discovered that the area was the scene of a crime and had been taped off, meaning that filming here was definitely out of the question.

Later the same day, we discovered that the reason the police were at Hallam Towers is because a body had been found. This article was uploaded shortly after we had finished shooting for the day. The full article can be seen here.

Unsurprisingly, we were therefore forced to relocate our shooting location. Our backup location was an abandoned house behind Liberty Works Accommodation, which we were unable to enter, but could still film from the outside. This location unfortunately, was a frustrating drop in quality from Hallam Towers. In order to maintain the illusion of the location being a run-down area, we could only film the house from certain angles, thereby limiting our creative possibilites. Another annoying issue was the construction work going on around the area (the location being an industrial area). This meant that it was much more difficult to record sound without an annoying level of background noise disrupting the scene; meaning that more work needed to be done in post-production to correct this.

The reason behind us being unable to use Hallam Towers was indeed a peculiar of location issues, but nonetheless, unforseeable events such as these can be very problematic in filmmaking, especially in terms of location scouting, as there is very little that can be done to prevent it. Not knowing when Hallam Towers would be usable again, we were forced to improvise with a secondary location; which in this case turned out to be a detriment to the film's quality. Unfortunately, due to the news not yet reaching the press at the time of shooting, this was not an eventuality we could have forseen.