Location

We looked at other films of the same genre of ours, which we decided was sports comedy; we looked at cool runnings because it shared a few of our conventions. Donnie Darko was another film we looked at and thought the location at the start of the film where Donnie wakes up on a hill looked good. Obviously we couldn’t find a nearby mountain so we decided a hill and bikes would be good, this is where we took an idea from cool runnings to base it on a sports comedy.

The location we used was a spinney going down a steep hill; this was perfect for bike-orientated theme of our opening sequence. We chose a day to film when it was very wet and windy, the mud and cold added another layer of filming and provided pathetic fallacy. The location provides us with opportunities to use different shots; the banks of the spinney are higher than the track so we could use establishing and panning shots. The corners gave us the opportunity to do dramatic shots of the riders and to zoom in on individual’s faces and get close up shots.

We were able to add some match on action when we filmed the opening parts to the sequence at my house. We chose my house as the location for the opening sequence because it was the nearest house available to the spinney and it allowed us to do some interesting shots in the garage and outside.

- Simon Williams