Manchester test shoot prep

The first thing I did when George and I decided that it would be a good idea to use the charity event Innovation of Justice as a chance to conduct a test shoot was to recce the location as much as I could. At first all we knew was that it was being held at Manchester University however after contacting the university directly by telephone they informed me it was being held in the Reynolds Building. So I researched into where the nearest parking is, which happened to be the Charles Street car park, this is a multi-story carpark next to the North campus, a couple of minutes walk from the Renold Building. You do have to pay for parking, it’s about £8 for a day however the head of External Relations at the university Sophie Thies said I could talk to one of the event coordinators about claiming the money back.

Now that parking was sorted I requested a floor plan from Ms. Thies as she had seemed very helpful and cooperative as well as friendly over email. By the following day she had emailed me both a picture of the room and the Floor plan of the Building informing me it would be held in room C9.

Following this correspondence, I marked all possible positions on the floorplan in which we would be able to place the cameras allowing for access to fire exits etc. I played around with camera positioning for a while on the floor plan but to me, there was only really one set up that would allow for fire escape access and plug socket access in case all batteries ran out and we needed to run the camera off of direct power from the mains. The set up consisted of One Panasonic at the top of the first stairwell, to the right-hand side to allow for not only a wider range/ angle of vision for the camera but in case of a fire people would still be able to get past. I made sure however that the doors where I was going to place the camera wasn't a fire exit which it was not as the other set of double doors were electronic and automatically opened and stayed open until the alarm was turned off if it ever went off in the event of a fire. The red dots on the floor plan indicate fire extinguishers so if I had set the camera up at the top of the other double doors not only would I be blocking a fire exit I would be obstructing a fire extinguisher. Therefore The camera placement you can see below is the best possible set up in that room.

We also attached a GoPro to the glass window of the projection room above the back row of seats to gain wide shots of the audience and also experiment with the possibility of having time-lapse footage.