HEY ALL.
SEEING AS I AM UP TO UP TO MY FUCKING UVULA IN EDITING AT THE MOMENT I TURN OVER BLOG DUTIES AGAIN TO MY YET UNCREDITED YOUNGER BROTHER
ENJOY....
On Saturday the cast and crew met at Broc Glic HQ (also known as Mark and Rachel's house) at 8am. everyone was dosed on caffeine (and in my case nicotine) and nervous as hell, but also really excited. The best thing about the weekend was how positive everyone felt and how committed they were to making Mark’s vision happen, but by God some of us (by which I mean me) were shit-scared of fucking it up for him. The initial plan was to have me do most of the camera work, but this ended up being scrapped for the sake of expediency (much to my relief in many ways). Saturday’s shoot started very positively, all the technical shots were done in the timeframe allocated and Mark seemed happy with the results. The performance shots on the other hand, were not so easy. Richie and Chris’s performance was top shelf and they had great chemistry on camera. However when viewing the rushes that night it became clear that the combination of improvised dialogue and shooting entire scenes of them together in one take didn’t work out. In the great director’s words, “we have gold and we have shit, often on the same fucking take”. When doing Sunday’s shoot schedule Mark made the decision to shoot tight front on shots of Chris and Richie acting certain of their lines for more cutaway options. It looks like this was successful but the editing process is the time when we’ll know for sure.
Conditions when we arrived at the park were adequate, but certainly not ideal. We had been hoping for a dry overcast day, but what we got was bright sunshine with broken cloud cover. The footage has not been reviewed in detail yet, but it looks like the light source and shadows will annihilate continuity on the park scenes. On the plus side Mark always prioritised performance over continuity and performance is one area where you will see no negativity from this quarter. Scenes involving extras, which required no dialogue, were more straightforward and successful, bar one. In one scene Richie’s character is required to leave the park bench where he is speaking to Chris, and bum a cigarette from a passerby. Despite the wonderful performance from a desperately handsome upcoming young actor with “smoldering Irish eyes” every take was totally unusable.
MARK - STILL ON ABOUT THE SMOULDERING FUCKING EYES, JESUS, AMY WAS BEING NICE, WHAT SHE WAS TRYING TO SAY WAS THAT YOUR EYES LOOK LIKE PISS HOLES IN SNOW
This scene in particular taught us that for any future shoots we cannot rely on the viewfinder on the XL1 and we will have to get a monitor. In fact allow me to digress on this point The viewfinder on the XL1 is woefully inadequate, particularly for outdoor shoots. In some respects colours that seem subtle and muted can look washed out once the footage is imported, but more importantly as in the scene described above objects in shadow cannot be seen at all on the viewfinder but appear as clear as day once the footage is onscreen Case in point is the scene alluded to above where I appeared as an extra. On every single take not only was the boom pole visible, but so was the fucking soundman. For any burgeoning filmmaker who may be reading this please for the love of God buy, rent, beg borrow or steal a fucking monitor, particularly if you’re shooting outdoors. Also, if you plan to record sound directly to the camera, get a long cable for the cans so the soundman can stand far the fuck away.
After a long morning and afternoon of carrying and frankly standing around in the cold (everyone says this about every movie shoot but by Christ it’s true) the cast and crew got to leave for home with strict instructions to be back bright at early at our second location on Sunday morning. Mark at I retired to Broc Glic Towers to review our footage. Mark was not feeling massively positive due to the aforementioned setbacks about it and another newcomer’s mistake did nothing to dispel these feelings. Here I feel I can impart another piece of advice for new filmmakers. Never, fucking EVER review DV footage in windows media player. We genuinely believed we had nothing usable after seven hours shooting. After using a real piece of software to review the footage we realised that while we would have to visit the park for some pickups, we did have usable takes for the vast majority of the scenes shot on Saturday. That evening Mark and I went back to the drawing board for the Sunday shoot schedule. Knowing we would have to revisit our fist location and that the we had only 3 hours to get the bar scene shot before they opened we were far more ruthless (in truth most of the ruthlessness came from me with Mark’s head getting redder and redder) but a more realistic shoot schedule was written for Sunday at this point, beds beckoned.
Stay tuned for my report on day two of production.
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