Looking for a location to film

After doing our storyboard, we wanted to look for a suitable place to film. This would need to be an alleyway, or something similair, and it needed to be fully, or mostly shadowed.
However for one of the scenes we needed to do a crane shot, and so the location would need a bridge, balcony or a level that was higher up than the pavement or grass, where most of the majority of filming would take place.
We also needed it to have good mise-en-scene, and the place we found did.
We looked around the Angel area, because this is close to college, so if there were any complications it would be useful. Additionaly, it wouldn't waste alot of filming time to get there.
The first place we looked at, was the sidewalk to a canal. This was dark, it had lots of vines, a black gate and it was on a slope. Unfortunately it was very narrow, and so we would be easily disrupted by the people walking past, and we wouldn't have a very good set up for the camera.
Also there wasnt a place high enough to film a crane shot, and we were adamant about having that shot, because it would show our skill with shots.
So, we continued to look, and luckily, not long after we found somewhere else that looked okay, but we decided it was to out in the open, and too much sunlight was getting to it.
Then, after walking just a bit further down the road, and round a corner, we found the perfect place to shoot. There was a balcony, as it was a courtyard to flats, there was a door, which we later used (with permission from the owners) and really good mise-en-scene. There was also a staircase leading down to another location we used, to build up some tension.
Satisfied with the location, we took a snapshot and came back to college, to hire out a camera.