Shooting Day 1 - Building Our Bedroom Set

During the half-term holidays, we planned to come into school for two days in order to build our bedroom set and film within it whilst there were not many students around. On the first day, we would build the set and work out where the lighting needed to be.

Bedroom shoot, day 1

We arrived at school with all of the props, equipment and resources we needed to transform the corner of our media classroom into a bedroom! We started by clearing the floor of the area that we were going to use, which left us with this...

...As you can see, the walls are a very bright pink colour and a pastel blue - the complete opposite to the look we wanted for our bedroom set! We would have to completely cover the walls and floor in order to make it look realistic. However, we first worked out how much of the corner we would need to cover all of the camera angles we would use. We removed all of the existing posters and notices from the wall and started to replace them with our own posters and pictures...

...We thought carefully about the posters we used to cover the walls. Because we wanted the room to appear dark, we wanted posters that had a black background or were predominantly made of dark colours. We also chose posters that included William Control himself, musicians of a similar genre or were for films that fans of William Control might recognise (films with a dark subject matter, much like his music)...

...Once we had finished covering enough of the walls, our set was starting to take shape and look a lot more like we had envisioned. Parts of the pink wall were showing through the gaps between the posters, so we used black sugar paper to make the walls look seamless...

...At this point, with the exception of the floor, the main thing we had to do was to replace the contents of the shelving unit. We removed all of the textbooks and covered the cardboard boxed. We then arranged some of our props in the shelves - books, photo frames, jewellery, perfume bottles - in order to create the effect of a bedroom. The books we placed on the shelves were also specifically chosen to relate to William Control's audience, with many of them (Kiss Me Judas, Let The Right One In, Dorian Gray) being referenced in some of his songs...

...Finally, we had to move floor props into the set. We moved two thick crash mats from the PE gym to the media classroom and stacked them on top of each other to make the right shape. We then covered them with black sheets and pillows to create the look of a single bed. Lastly, we moved in a black chair and covered the wooden floor with black blankets and a large dark purple rug.

We had now created our set and were happy with the outcome, it actually looked like a bedroom! Once we had placed the lights in the right position, and arranged the wires safely, we were ready for filming the following day.