With the planning done, I worked on a couple of variations on the script until I had one that I was happy with, and not long after that it was time to shoot the trailer. We planned out the first three days of filming, but the last quarter of the trailer was still to be planned as we could only find three days in the same week where we were all together without anything else getting in the way.
On the first day, we decided to do the interrogation scene. This was going to be the last scene of the trailer, but it seemed like a relatively easy scene to shoot, so we decided to do that one first. We didn't really have any problems except for the window in the room we chose to shoot the scene in didn't have a curtain, which meant that there was no easy way of stopping the light from getting into the room, which kind of went against the idea of the room being completely dark until the antagonist turned the light on. We overcame this by just piling up bags in front of the window to block the light. Other than that, we didn't have any serious problems, and the filming went ahead as planned.
On the second day of filming, we planned to do the opening scene and the confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist, since the antagonist and the protagonist were in both scenes, and there was only one additional actor required. Since these scenes were to be shot after dark, we had to wait until the end of school, and them some - but since the school closed at six o'clock, we had to work fast. The only problem that came up was that the protagonist and the antagonist were both wearing the same clothes in both scenes, despite the fact that the two scenes were supposed to happen on completely different days. While we figured that most people probably wouldn't notice this, we decided to make sure that the characters looked like they were wearing different clothes - I lent one of the characters my jacket, and the other turned their coat inside out so it looked like a different piece of clothing. It wasn't exactly ideal, but you couldn't tell when watching the footage back, so we figured it'd look fine in the finished trailer.
Day three of filming was the day where we decided to do the more technical scene - the poker scene. This would be, we thought, the most difficult scene to shoot, so we went a little overboard with the planning to make sure nothing went wrong. We also gave ourselves a whole day in which to get everything ready and shoot the scene. We put together a relatively realistic looking poker table by putting together a few tables and a large green cloth that we borrowed from the textiles department, and the actors were all ready in time to start filming. In the end, the planning and preparation was worth it, and we shot the scene with pretty much no hassle. I'm pretty sure that if we'd decided to shoot the scene on the first day instead of the third, we'd have encountered a lot of problems, but since we left it until day three and had experience from the previous two days of filming, it went by pretty smoothly.
The fourth day of filming happened a week after the last day of filming, as we had to find a day where we were all ready to film and didn't have anything else in the way. Thankfully, this day consisted of the crime scenes we'd have in the montage, and the filming went by relatively smoothly. A different member of the group directed these scenes, but since it was a montage, we thought that it wouldn't be too difficult to make them fit in with the other scenes and decided we'd risk it. The scenes themselves were technically very easy to shoot, not really requiring more than three or four different camera angles, except for the bank robbery scene, where I had to act as a bank robber with a plastic shotgun (the way that the scene is edited, you barely see me anyway, so I'm cool with that). Like the day of the poker scene, we filmed everything with basically no problems at all.
After all the scenes were filmed, we had to edit it together. The first version of the trailer was put together quickly as a kind of proof-of-concept type deal, but was obviously not well edited enough to be our final product. For one thing, the timing was off, with characters appearing to instantaneously move across the screen when a camera angle was supposed to change, and we accidentally used footage we'd intended to scrap rather than the actual takes that we were happy with. Instead of going back and making changes, we simply scrapped the whole thing and edited it again.
There were still a couple of things we hadn't decided on, as we had decided to wait until the footage was almost edited together into a final draft until we decided on a couple of important things. The first was the song we were going to use as a soundtrack. After watching the trailer back, we decided that the song "POWER" by Kanye West would suit. Although I'm not particularly fond of West's music, I do have to admit that I like the song, and it definitely fits with the themes of our film trailer - the whole idea of the protagonist rising up to gain more and more power and wealth until it eventually comes around to bite him and he ends up in more trouble than he'd anticipated, etcetera. After we'd picked this song, we went back and did a little more editing to make some of the cuts and the scenes suit the changes in the music.
The last thing that we had to decide on was a pretty big decision - we had to come up with a name for the film the trailer was for. We'd decided to leave this decision until the end as we decided it'd be easier to make the product and then find a name that summed up what the trailer was about, than make up a name and then build a trailer around that name. We got together for a brainstorming session (well, two of us did - the third didn't actually show up) and took advantage of a whiteboard in one of the Sixth Form's rooms to write down ideas. Eventually we came up with several ideas, but the title for the film was sent to us by our absent team member through a text - "Playing With Fire".
We liked this idea a lot, most of all because it sums up the basic idea of what our protagonist goes through, playing dangerously until the tide changes and everything goes wrong, and also because we realised that our protagonist actually uses the phrase (wrongly) during the voiceover. At one stage during the crime montage, the protagonist says "when you play with fire, you get beat" - this is a deliberate misquote, meant to inject a little black humour into the film and make the protagonist seem flippant yet weary of his predicament.
With the title and the end credits basically sorted, the film trailer was finally finished. We were all happy with the way it turned out, and the general feedback from the other actors involved in the production was positive (probably because, well, they were in it, but whatever).
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