Yesterday we arrived at Coundon Court School to shoot our final day of filming for Bettie Perry. After doing the location recce for this building, I felt confident that the other members of the group would like it. We were greeted by Paul O’Brien and also the caretaker of the school, who said if we wished, we could also film in the reception. The reception was a beautiful part of the school with lovely columns and it also had a lovely stairway, which in another type of film would have been wonderful to use. The group decided that it wasn’t very ‘schooly’ and reminded us of scenes from the Harry Potter movies, and so we filmed in the part of the school that I had previously agreed with Paul.
We set up the equipment quite quickly and after missing the third day of shooting I could tell that the group was getting organised more quickly than in previous days of shooting, which was quite pleasing as we had a limited time in which we could use this building for. In my opinion, what I liked about the scene in which we were shooting between ‘Max’ and ‘Bettie’ was that you could see after spending numerous days with each other, the characters had certain chemistry with each and so this made the scene look even better. The timing to complete the filming for this scene took just over an hour, which was very pleasing as we had what we wanted and still had a massive three hours to film the final scene of the film.
To film the final scene, we used the outside of the school. This is where ‘Bettie’ and ‘Max’ would walk into the sunset (well out of school) holding hands to live happily ever after (or say they hope). This was quickly filmed and took just under twenty minutes. After this had been filmed everybody on set was quite sad that it had finished. I think that the main reason for this was because everybody had got to be friends with each other and time on the set was usually quite good. So now, it’s time to put the filming equipment away and move onto editing this little beauty.
Overall, I can’t say a bad word about Coundon Court School, because right from when I contacted them about filming through to yesterday when they couldn’t have helped us anymore than they did. They have been very enthusiastic about this project…. So once again thank you.
Here are some ‘Behind the Scenes’ pictures from the day’s shoot:
