Location Scouting

 When finding a location there were a few problems, which was really frustrating! Originally we wanted to film in a house in London and have shot of john playing 'The agoraphobic' looking out onto the busy streets. However, when my partner Cordelia and I started sharing ideas and thinking more realistic about the filming we came to the conclusion that having London as the location may not be the best of ideas.

Reasons why not to film in London
Originally I thought London would be a great place to film as it has lots of interesting places and great filming opportunity amongst the city however the negatives outweighed the positives for filming.

Negatives

• To start off with me and partner didn't know anybody who lives in London. As we didn't know any house to shoot in we looked online at filming sets. From some of the photos on the websites the houses were beautiful and just what we were looking for, because we're both students we thought we'd get the studio at a very cheap price as we only needed it for a day. However, after a phone-call to the manager of the business the prices he was offering were ridicules and way over our budget! so we immediately scraped that idea.    http://www.shootfactory.co.uk/locations-london-houses.html (link to the Shoot Factory website)
• Getting transport to London can sometimes be difficult and pricey!
• When filming if me and my partner miss something out or have to re-shoot we wouldn't be able to do it as easily because we would either have to arrange the date in advance or one of us would have to go up there on their own.
• The people around us can be a big issue as they can unpredictable and may not want us filming the back of them.
• Would our actor be willing to go all the way to London?

Positives 

• There are amazing arsty places you can film and explore in London
• You would be able to see a big contrast between the lonely house of the characters and the people rushing on the claustrophobic streets
• We could make the reasoning to him not wanting to leave his house because of something that happened to him on the streets
• We could also background score the music or the people chatting to themselves in the crowds 

As you can see its not worth us even attempting to film there. To be honest we could always film the streets of our local town (Maidenhead) as it would have the same impact. Also our audience watching won't even be able to tell the difference between the two. I think filming in London just sounds 'cooler' and more professional, when actually its not really ideal for both of us and our actor.

Inspiration

 These are types of settings i'm looking to recreate.I want my characters house to be quite cluttered and considered old fashioned. I thought it would be a good idea to try and find a house with white walls therefore the clutter inside looks more obvious. A big statement i'm looking for is a bookshelf as my character reads a lot.
 The only difference between my house and the inspiration photos I collected is that I want the house to be tidy, I don't want the characters image to be of lower class as I don't want it to distract you and take away the impact of his illness. I just want him to have a lot of items in the house from years of collecting and hording.

The next stage of Location Scouting

After dealing with the massive palava about London we thought it would be best to leave the location scouting for a couple of days just give us a break and to make us think sufficiently. We thought we'd go back to the basics and ask to look at friends/families houses between us. To much of our surprise the first person we asked was John our actor. As i'm not that familiar with John I had no idea what his house was like however once he invited me over to look at the different rooms I then realised it was just what I was looking for. 

John lives in a white three story house. The fact that it's three story lets us be able to explore different angles and rooms within it. What I found really interesting and was my favourite feature of the house was the garish cabinets in the kitchen. As they are so bright it makes them look old fashioned and outdated which relates to our character. There are some features of the house which links to my inspiration such as the busy bookshelves and the cluttered dinning room. As the house is North facing the back of the house captures a lot of light which is just what we needed as the majority of shots we are going to shoot will be at the back end of the house.