Short film diary - Week 5...

Last week I was mostly going to weddings and parties and not getting enough sleep. As a result not much film-related stuff got done. But as promised here are some pictures of the stuff what I have been working on in preparation for shoot.

Firstly, and most importantly, here is the monkey:

He smells of old people and only has one ear. We need to chop his paw off but I'm scared whoever does it will be cursed.

I spent most of the previous weekend storyboarding. In an effort to compensate for my inexperience I'm trying to be as prepared as possible. The problem is I can't really draw. Witness my inability to draw below:

I decided to steal a technique a friend of mine has used for shorts before which involves creating a storyboard from photos. So I spent Saturday 'sketching' out the shots I wanted. Then on Sunday I recruited Andrea, Brother Pete and his girlfriend Charlotte to play all the parts as I took photos like this one:

And this one:

There weren't really enough of us to play all the characters, so one of the bad guys had to be represented by this terrifying nightmare creation:

Since then I have been slowly arranging those photos into a storyboard like this:

It's kind of a laborious process but at the same time it really helped me get some way to figuring out how I want to shoot it. It's a good way of working out which areas of the locations we need to dress and where we can put the camera.

It also threw up some problems - I was hoping to match the hallway in one location to a room in a completely different location, but realised that the doors are hinged on opposite sides. It also made me realise that some places I wanted to shoot in may be impossible, but some might just work. We won't be able to replicate all of it though - it's easy enough to stick a tiny stills camera inside a fridge to take a Fridge POV shot, but it might not be so easy with an actual video camera.

Arranging the storyboard has been pretty useful too in terms of thinking about the finished product and how it will cut together. It's also taking ages and I'm still only halfway through, but it's definitely been worthwhile so far.

In other news the schedule has been pretty much finalised, I met with one dancer and am hopefully seeing more tomorrow and my art department has been doing an excellent job gathering props despite my general slowness in replying to e-mails. Speaking of which, here's some awesome concept art.

Here's the playwright Anton Chekhov who plays a pivotal role in the film:

And here are a couple of costume designs:



This week I'm really busy again but hope to be able to get the storyboard finished at least.