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| Spooky Castle (above) |
John then showed us around and we were able to go into four out of their five attractions. They weren't as scary as they would be at night as there are usually actors but thankfully they weren't there this morning. There were four haunted house style attractions and one maze, but each of the haunted houses had a different theme. The first one we went in was the Spooky Castle, which was a 1940s old house theme, the next one we went in called Thirteen Freaks had a freak show theme and the third and final house we went in was called The Edge and it was vampire themed.
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| Thirteen Freaks (above, left) |
They were all amazing attractions and were very scary even without the actors. We weren't expecting to actually go in the attractions so were very privileged to have had the opportunity.
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| MassAcre (above) |
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| MassAcre (above) |
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| MassAcre (above, left) Sub Focus (above, right) |
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| The Edge (above, left) Thirteen The Freaks (above, right) |
We were setting up for the interview with John when we realised that the sun was quite bright and the best backdrop for the interview either had the sun behind the camera, meaning it was in Katie and John's eyes or the sun was in front of the camera, causing Katie and John to look very dark. In the end we had the sun next to them with one of the painted container units and some hay stacks for the backdrop. We also applied an ND filter on the camera which brought the exposure down to the correct level as when we turned the camera on it was very over exposed.
We were close to the Thirteen The Freaks attraction which was making a lot of noise which you could hear on the microphone but it was only slightly. A bit of background noise will help the interview, to give it a bit of atmosphere from the attractions.
We rehearsed a couple of times with John so we could work out timings. Alex was on the camera and I had the timer and script so I could signal to Katie when she had to be on the last interview question at 1'00'' and onto the quiz and then again at 1'40'' when she had to start wrapping it up. The take we filmed lasted exactly 2'00'' which we were very impressed with. We only had to do that one take which was great because in 'live' TV there would only be the one take. John was a brilliant interviewee and he gave us a lot of information in such a small period of time.
We originally wanted to film at the opening night, especially in the evening to get the scary atmosphere, but they were due to have a large number of people attending and us with our equipment wouldn't have been safe. We were also unable to film on another evening because of time constraints. This led us to have to film during the day, the weather was lovely which was good but we would have preferred filming it at night. I think we still did well and produced a good result.
At the end of the interview and after we filmed our GVs we asked if John could sign a consent form. This is so we can put our final video up on YouTube, UCA website or social media with the consent from the people who are involved. Luckily, John had no problem being filmed and was happy to sign the consent form for us.
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| Consent form |
Our first shoot day went really well from the very beginning. All the staff were lovely, just left us to it and didn't mind us wondering around filming. The timings went really well, for example, we weren't in the middle of a question/answer when we had to wrap it up. We got an even amount of interview questions to quiz questions/answers in the 2 minute time slot also. We had more access to the farm than what we thought we would, this allowed us to get as many GVs as we wanted. We could also walk through the haunted houses without being rushed as there were no members of the public about and got really good shots because of this. I definitely think we've been able to present Broadwitch HauntFest at its best.
I think it would have been good to shoot when it was open to the public as we could get the real atmosphere but we could also have been restricted with the light, so there are cons to doing it at night as well as during the day. Additionally, if we did it at night when it was open, we wouldn't have been able to get all the access inside for as long as we did. We had to light up some bits with our phones to see the detail of inside the houses on the EX - we wouldn't have been able to stop and do this if we were surrounded by the public. Alex and myself couldn't get the focus to work at the beginning of the interview and had Katie and John standing around waiting for us. This wasted a bit of time and it was difficult to see with the sun shining on us. In the future we will make sure we have the focus working and maybe film/test the settings inside or in the shade so we could see the screen properly.
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