We filmed some stuff! Look, I somehow did pretentious directing poses without even realising it!!!
After saying I wouldn't be able to keep up the blog while we were shooting I suddenly decided I would give it a go, and now I'm thinking it might not work out all that well. There's a peculiar kind of braindead tiredness that only seems to come from shooting a film and that's how I feel right now. But it's a familiar kind of tiredness too which is kind of comforting.
I am mostly going to write about being tired. I should probably go to bed.
Anyway, filming went really really well. I was a bit apprehensive as we were due to start late on account of some necessary song recording stuff. We do have another song, by the way. It is the most amazing song ever. Well, it was sounding like the most amazing song ever already, and then today I finally heard the fully recorded version with the actors singing their parts and now it's better than the most amazing song ever. I am honestly not exaggerating.
So I met the crew and one of the actors, Christophe (who has a website with a blog and stuff here) at the location at 10.30am and we started rehearsing the scenes as he hadn't been able to make it along to the rehearsal the week before.
Also, check out the awesome poster in the background what Charlotte made!
Meanwhile the crew set up lights and stuff. There seems to be a lot more stuff this time, and we had a lot of stuff last time. One day I will learn what some of the stuff is called.
We also have a bigger crew with some new faces as well as the old team. One of them, James, has about five mentions in the credits on the last film because he is essentially a one man film crew. I realised when he came in that I hadn't seen him at all since we shot the last film, which is over a year and a half ago now. It felt a bit like we had never really stopped, we just had this really long break in between filming.
We were filming in the basement of the Beechwood Hall Hotel which is an amazing location. It looks like it should definitely be haunted and is full of awesome set dressing stuff that is just sitting around. We mostly filmed in the hallway, which was possibly the most uninteresting part of the whole place.
Setting up seemed to take forever as always, and then I started to worry about time until I decided to give my watch to Andrea and let her worry about time instead. I still worried about time. I've said it before, but I would love to one day be like Peter Fonda at the beginning of Easy Rider and just throw my watch on the ground and then drive away. I just can't actually see myself ever doing that in real life.
Generally though I found the whole experience less nerve-wracking than last time. I used to worry about stupid things like whether I was directing right, or directing enough, or what people thought of me directing. This time I don't care so much about all that. It all seemed to work out okay last time so I'm confident I mostly know what I'm doing and I have tons of faith in the crew and actors I'm working with because I already know they're all brilliant.
I did learn one thing today. There was a long dialogue scene that took ages to set up and even longer to get right. By about 3pm we were about halfway through the shots we needed to film for that scene and I wanted to press on and get the scene finished before breaking for lunch (which we were already late for). Andrea insisted we break for lunch anyway and it ended up not being that much of a problem. The lights were already set up, everyone knew what they were doing and we really didn't lose that much for taking a break. So you could say I learnt that there's never a bad time to take a break, or you could say I learnt that my wife is always right. Either way, it was a good call.
Otherwise there really isn't much to report! There were no major problems, we didn't forget anything important (not that I know of) and I didn't lose my temper with any daft continuity problems. We finished at exactly the time I had planned to finish and still had time to go shopping and get stuff ready for tomorrow. We've got loads still to get through and today was one of the easier days, but for a first day it was a really good start!
Right, now I really do need to go to bed. Early start tomorrow!
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