Filming in the city center doesn’t really pose many risks since it’s a public space and worst case you just move somewhere else, but filming inside an active club like Form introduced some risks that made the whole experience quite stressful at times, even though in the end we didn’t really have that much go wrong.

The main thing i was stressed about going in was the camera since it was borrowed from our teacher and a busy club is not exactly the safest environment for expensive equipment, people bumping into you, drinks everywhere, not a lot of space to move carefully, so me and my partner decided that one of us would focus purely on holding and protecting the camera while the other directed, which i feel like was the right call since it meant someone always had eyes on it. Overheating was another thing we had to think about since clubs get really hot when packed and we were moving around a lot the whole night, both for us and for the camera itself since heat isn’t great for electronics, so we made sure to take breaks outside regularly and kept water on us the whole time which was easy since we were already ordering water at the bar for our actors anyway.

Crowd interference was probably the most annoying risk in practice since Form is an active club and people were just walking around doing their thing completely unaware we were filming, someone walking into a shot mid take happened more than once and we just had to reshoot which added time we didn’t really have, so we ended up sticking to quieter corners of the club where possible and timing our shots around the crowd.The last thing we thought about was slipping since our protagonist has scenes where he stumbles around acting drunk and club floors get wet pretty fast especially near the bar, so we scouted the space beforehand and made sure to avoid those areas during filming, which ended up being fine since Form had a relatively dry layout away from the main bar area.

Overall it was stressful going in but i feel like having permission from Form and knowing the venue from scouting it beforehand made a big difference since we weren’t figuring things out on the spot, the staff knew what we were doing and that alone took a lot of the pressure off.