Monday 21 June 2010

Short Film Diary - Week 7...

Loads happened last week...

Had a bit of trouble getting permission for the location we want to film at. After being assured it would be free for non-profit projects we put the application in only to be told that we needed to pay a fee that's at least half our planned budget. This is after we paid for insurance in order to apply for the permission in the first place. Luckily, Andrea used her Producing powers to convince them otherwise and we now have permission for free!

Everything else has been going pretty well too. On Friday the creature my friend Geraint has been constructing arrived. It is the coolest thing I have ever received in the post. I would put a picture up but I'd rather everyone see it for the first time in the finished film.

Then on Friday evening we recorded a new version of the song for the musical number with the actor who will be singing (previously the vocals had been sung by the composer). This also went really well and I should be getting the final version soon. Feeling rather pleased with ourselves myself and said actor then went to the pub to meet my DoP and friends. Lots of beer was drunk while we did some test shots with the camera, mostly of me drinking lots of beer.

Saturday we fought through hangovers to get test shots of the various locations, like this one.

Sunday was the rehearsal. This was the part I'd been looking forward to all week but was also slightly worried about as I don't have much experience working with actors. Andrea gave me a ten minute overview of her entire drama degree which helped. On the day it actually went really well. One of the actors couldn't make it which was a shame but otherwise we had a good turnout and everyone worked really hard and had loads of enthusiasm. Completely by chance, three of our actors went to school together and the fact that they already know each other really helps. I maybe tried to do too much in the morning, having the make-up artist, DoP and dance choreographer come along at the same time to go through their bits with the actors, but it was a good opportunity for everyone working on the film to meet everyone else.

It was a long day but we managed a couple of readthroughs of the script then worked through the individual scenes, working out some of the blocking and tweaking performances as we went along. This was really useful and made me feel a lot more confident about the shoot. Also realised I'm working with an awesome team of people here and that makes things so much easier.
This week we're doing one more rehearsal and then getting the last few props ready for the first shoot on Saturday. We're filming the most complicated scenes first and it's going to be a really long weekend, but if we can pull it off it should all be downhill from there.

I still need to finish that shot list though...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

love the beard.
Good luck for the weekend.