Documentary Unit: Filming Day 2

The plan for day 2 of filming had to be altered slightly due to the disruptions of the trains the night before. We didn't let this affect us though, and started off the day with a light breakfast which my dads girlfriend kindly left for us. We planned our transport and timings at the breakfast table, and as I knew the area quite well, I was in charge of working out where to eat, and where to get the tube from.

We decided to get a big lunch at Nandos as we knew this would fill us up for the day of filming. We then jumped on the tube and made our way to Stratford. Again, we got a train straight from Stratford to Brentwood. This time we decided to walk to the training centre, which took about 40 minutes.

We got to the training centre and noticed Roy cleaning up the path, so I had a quick chat with him and again he gave us the freedom to film/access anywhere we wanted to. So we took some shots of the signs outside, and more location shots. We then had to wait for Helen's friend to drop off Helens laptop as we needed to digitalise the footage to make more room on the camera. Eventually she arrived and we managed to get everything on the laptop just before the training began.

We then got into position and Roy offered me to take part in the training. I agreed to get attacked by one of the dogs, who is trained to fight criminals. Obviously I took precautions and wore the protective pad on my arm. I then had to hold my arm out and let the dog attack it. We thought it would be a good idea to put the Go-Pro on me, so we could get a shot from my perspective. This turned out to be great, and we got the dog looking vicious at our other camera too.

Chris and I then participated in the next training session where we had to race our dogs around a course. This was really fun, and Helen managed to get great shots of both dogs in action. We then proceeded to film other dogs doing different jumps using both the Sony and Go-Pro. Chris was back on camera and I was directing him, while Helen was placing the Go-Pro in different places to get dynamic shots. The dogs were jumping through fire and going through tunnels. We managed to get some great footage which we're all very happy with.

Lastly, we filmed a border collie doing a training course at high speed. Again we used both cameras, this time attaching the Go-Pro to the dog. This didn't turn out as well as we thought, as the camera kept moving. However we have found a harness which we are going to use next time we are there.

Overall it was another successful day where we got lots of great footage