The Breakfast Club - Filming

As much as I love filming and The Breakfast Club, filming the opening was difficult.

On screen and to the audience, the opening looks very simple and you'd think 'it doesn't look that hard to film', but when it's your turn to film it, it's difficult.

Before the characters are properly introduced, we see different shots of the school e.g. a long shot of the hallway, close up of the trophy cabinet, the camera pans down a graffitied locker. Then the characters are introduced differently by their mode of transport, most of which are cars.

We're 16/17. We don't drive cars.


So to overcome that little problem, we had to use toy cars but the toy cars came with their own problems as the characters are filmed inside a car, and obviously humans can't fit in toy cars. So we had to zoom into the cars (pretending someone is in there) and then film us in a separate shot, pretending as if we're in the cars. And once again, there was another problem.

There's one part where two characters are introduced in the same shot, and it was difficult to film this part. Instead we had to use our perspective and film from a different angle to make it seem like the actor was walking in front of a car. For the other character, we just filmed a different type of entrance for them.

There are only three of us in the group, and there are 5 characters in the film, so two of us had to play different roles.

In terms of the beginning of the opening, it was a lot easier to film in non-sequence as it saved us a lot of time by not having to go up and down the same stairs.