Location research: Waterloo, Southbank and London Bridge

Today, our group went to various places in London to do location research for our project, so that we can find the best places to produce an effective parkour chase sequence and also, to help us storyboard and visualise the project.

Matt and Will both went to Shoreditch to look for various parkour spots which had an urban look; whereas I went with Nat, Ed and the newest addition of our team, Perri up to Southbank to take photos of various spots that could work within our piece.  Click on images to view large.

I mainly took shots of railings and steps, as well as balconies.  I went largely for shots that wouldn't resemble Waterloo/Southbank too closely, in order to make our environment more original and I made sure that there were no signs, advertisements or posters that would ruin the scene.

If you look at the architecture around Southbank, many of the designs are very rigid in shape but also have some curved corners.  Many even have floors that are larger in width than others.  I also took a few photos around the outside of the Hayward and I came across many railings, along with a spiralling yellow staircase around the outside.

We also came across this structure near Tower Bridge that is apparently used as an outdoor theatre.  You can see how these steps can be used as seats!!  We thought this may be good for some parkour sequences, but I think that it would also suit skateboarding.

The main drawback of filming in central London is that it is full of people, and this may run the sense of this being a chase.  It wouldn't make sense to have a monster chasing one parkour runner and passers-by make no reaction!  One solution that I proposed is that if we were to film in Southbank, that we do our filming in the early hours of the morning, as they did in the film 28 Days Later.

We will just have to see how Shoreditch was for Matt and Will; or we may look for more areas that would make good parkour/chase spots.