"The Hangover" Practical task

For one of our first pieces of practical work we are recreating the opening two minutes of "The Hangover". The recreation doesn't have to be accurate to every last detail, in the opening minutes there's a shot of the wedding cake, however if we can't get a wedding cake to shoot then we can use something else it doesn't necessarily have to be a white wedding cake with orange flowers. Below is the opening scene that we have to recreate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKtHA8EFgIo&feature=related

The story of "The Hangover" is that 4 best friends are on a road trip to Las Vegas for their friends' bachelor party. However things don't go to plan and they end up loosing the groom. When they cannot find their friend they try and remember what happened the night before.

9/10/11

Today we will be filming the car scene with Bradley Cooper's character Phil and the 3 other characters in the background with the beaten up car. We will be recreating this scene in a field in Wymondham with a car in the background. We have enlisted my friend, Alex, to play the character of Phil for this scene. Although he does not look exactly like Bradley Cooper we have decided to take some artistic licence. He looks slightly similar but not a spitting image.
So it was easier to see the different shots I did print screens of the different shots so it was easier to quickly look at it rather than having to keep rewinding the DVD, although we did this anyway.

As you can see in the image below Phil is in the front of the shot and 3 blurred characters in the background, you don't know who these characters are at this point in the film as this is a flash forward beginning. Although you can tell by the positioning of the characters that they are not happy, the two by the car, one leaning by the door and one sitting on the hood, that they are looking down which could be they are disappointed. There is another character further behind them with his back to the camera.

Bradley Copper as Phil with Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Mike Epps' characters in the background.

Although in this scene the characters are in the Nevada dessert we are filming in a field, it would have been near to impossible to film in a location similar to the one of the film short of flying out to America to film this student film. Not all of the costume is the same either, the sunglasses are not exactly the same, however we have tried to get as close to possible.

Alice, Alex and myself discussing ways of shooting the scene

We filmed the scene at a local farm, we only had 4 people on set so we only had two people in the background of the shot whereas in the film there are 3. The weather was not the same as the weather in the scene, as I've stated before we didn't film in the Nevada dessert so obviously the weather wouldn't be the same, luckily it did not rain whilst we were filming but it was quite windy. You can't hear it that much when we played the scene back but we are planning on cutting that out in the editing.

Alex with his "cut lip" that I drew with red and black pen

As Phil's character has a cut on his lip we tried to create this with lipstick, although our actor was not comfortable with this, so we decided to use red and black pen instead., as seen above. The first shot we took was the side view of Phil's face. We shot this and out of the shot I held the script for our actor to read and I read Tracey's lines for him to know when to follow. Once we finished this shot, we then did the distance shot with the car in the background. Myself and Alice played the two extras in the background. I lent against the side of the car like Ed Helms' character Stu and Alice sat on the bonnet of the car like Zach Galifianakis' character Alan. Georgie ran the lines through with Alex as they filmed so it was the right amount of pausing between the lines. When we did the play back we decided to change the shot with the car in the background, in the film the car and the characters in the background are slightly blurred but when we shot it, Alice and I were still in focus. So we moved the car further away from the camera and re-filmed this shot. We are planning on editing this scene next lesson or in our spare time if we don't get anymore lesson time for this. 

Georgie, Alice and Myself