For the love of GOD, make sure that whoever is in charge of your shoot has made sure that you actually have permission to film on your location. And if you don’t, definitely don’t go waving any guns around really obviously where lots of people in the council offices across the road can see you and phone the police.

…I should explain.

In my Media Studies group, each student is required to make their own short film, and all creativity and organisation is left up to them, solely, the only other people they need are actors to be in the film and possibly a crew. I shot my film about a month ago, and it all worked out fine, only a couple of minor problems, but in general it was a good shoot.

My friend this past week organised the shoot for his film, which I agreed to act in. The script involves a man being shot in the chest, and the location he had planned to film at was an abandoned car park in town where we had filmed a stabbing scene a year before without running into any trouble.

However, guns are officially scarier than stabbing-things according to the council because this week we were spotted with a gun by an office worker, who went on to phone 999. Before we knew it we had 6 police-officers in front of us taking our details, searching our bags and frisking us, a police van behind us waiting for the worst to happen, and 2 police cars with dogs snarling in our direction. And according to the officer who was searching me, there was a group of armed guards carrying MP5s with scopes waiting around the corner, and if we hadn’t co-operated the chances of us getting shot were very likely.

I guess what I’m saying is, for god’s sake, do a proper Location Recce before you go out filming something that could be considered even SLIGHTLY dangerous because it could land you in a whole heap of trouble. Luckily for us, these officers had dealt with this before and were extremely lenient on us, as was the College, and there have been no real consequences from this.

Oh yeah, and we made Page 4 of our local newspaper.


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We were beat to the front page headline by news of a shoe-shop closing down.

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