Production

Production on Beaulieu was by far the best experience I've had working on a project for university. It wasn't easy, actually at times it was incredibly difficult, but in the end it was totally worth it. We spent four days shooting at our location in Kent and then two days shooting at a house in Hitchin for our interior scenes.

Because the crew was so small, it meant that transport ended up being very easy. I drove us all down to Kent on the first day, and after that Elliott was staying with our actor, whom also happened to be his girlfriend. This meant driving two hours there and two hours back every day for four days, which was really draining but I was so excited to be shooting this film that I didn't really feel it. I had some personal problems I was having to deal with at the time we were shooting which unfortunately did impact on the production on one day in particular, but the crew were very professional and although filming was delayed we all got our heads down together and got what we needed to get done done.

As I said previously, we didn't have everything planned out and we were following quite a loose structure. We'd decided what scenes we would be shooting on what days, but we deliberately wanted to leave a lot of it until the day we were filming to decide how to shoot certain scenes. We allowed the location to inspire us and we managed to come up with some really creative and beautiful shots when we were filming.

Another part of the filming process was the fact that we really wanted the character of Beau to be reflected in the film. For this we would give the camera to Merrin (our actress) and allow her to shoot certain bits that we would be editing to look like footage shot on her super 8 camera that she carries around in the film. Merrin did a great job really making her character a three dimensional being, considering she wasn't going to be having any dialogue. We would then ask her to repeat her movements with the super 8 camera and we shoot around her, which helped create a really nice continuity for the action and reflect the character.

When you look at the film, the weather looks absolutely perfect. Which is somewhat true, the sky was mostly beautifully clear and gave us some really nice natural light to shoot with, which was great considering we weren't in a position to have a full lighting rig with us. On top of this it was actually really cold, as we had a strong breeze coming in off the sea, but Merrin did a fantastic job hiding it on camera, we just had to make sure one of us was ready to run in with her coat as soon as we called cut.