Venue For Filming - Planning

I searched around my local area to find a venue for the house-party idea, that wouldn't look 'middle class' and would have the dark and dank feel that we want from the venue, in order to make the setting seem more appropriate for a murder.

After finding some old abandoned houses in old Stanmore Park, I phoned the council numerous times in order to ask for permission to use 1 of them as the setting for the film. After getting through, I was told I would receive e-mail conformation or rejection from the council within a week, depending on the safety of the homes that are there.

This was the response that I received:

From: Annecrowe@harrowcouncil.co.uk

To: Sbccharles2@aol.com

Stephen Charles,

Although we are glad that you inquired about using the houses that are in Stanmore as part of your film, we cannot allow you to use them due to health and safety issue that come with these, unsafe and boarded up buildings.

Three issues arise from these houses:

1. The buildings are all boarded up, and it would require a trained builder to remove them, and would be too unsafe without a builder
2. There is no power being fed to these houses, meaning no light can be used when in the buildings, making it very unsafe
3. Further worsening the safety issue of these buildings are their dilapidated state, due to which, we have deemed it too unsafe to film in.

We are sorry that you cannot film in these buildings and hope you find a new venue to film in.

Yours faithfully,

Anne Crowe, London Borough of Harrow

As a result of this, we are currently looking for a new venue to film in, which has put us at a disadvantage, as we have lost time in which we could have been filming at another venue instead of waiting for a reply from this one.