Beaulieu Pre-Production

In preparation for Beaulieu we decided first of all to have a look at some films we wanted to take inspiration from. Two directors we were going to take particular inspiration from were Wes Anderson and Richard Ayoade as we both liked their style of filmmaking. Both have a very visual style which is quite similar.

The approach we wanted to take was to make a film that didn't rely on a script or dialogue to tell the story. We wanted to push ourselves to tell a coherent story with nothing but visuals, and to make it beautiful. Even though the films we were going to be taking inspiration from had dialogue, they used the visuals to really help keep the viewer interested.

One point we needed to make sure we really focused on was the location, so we started by scouting possible locations online. We knew we wanted the film to be set at the seaside so we started thinking of seaside towns we thought would be able to provide us with a beautiful location. Being students, we immediately went down the cliche route of choosing Brighton, but after doing a bit of research we found that we would have to spend a lot of money to get permission to use this as a location so we started looking elsewhere.

We found that Kent have a fantastic film council that is very supportive of student productions. Their website has a great search feature that allows you to search for the types of locations you would like to use. After finding a location that looked suitable we decided to pay a visit and see if it would be suitable.

So this was the first thing that spent money on, after managing to raise over £600 on our crowd funding page for the film. The location was perfect and easily accessible with my car, so we knew where we would be setting the film.

The two of us wanted to take a different approach to the filming, and actually a lot of that came down to the fact that we didn't really know the location all that well. Although we had visited the location we just didn't have the time to properly scout the location for particular points we'd like to use for certain scenes. As I mentioned in a previous post, the fact that we were both on the same page meant that this wasn't going to be a problem, it was just going to be difficult. So we made a rough plan, and made sure that we'd allow ourselves enough time to get it done.