A different perspective

I'D LIKE TO GIVE A WARM WELCOME TO THE FIRST INVADER TO MY HALLOWED DOMAIN, THE GUEST BLOGGER THAT IS MY BROTHER, PETER. WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCENSORED AND AN UNBURDENED WITH PUNCTUATION ACCOUNT OF, NOT JUST THE SHIT I'VE BEEN THROUGH, BUT THE SHIT I PUT OTHERS THROUGH THIS WEEKEND ON THE 'LITTLE THINGS' SHOOT.

" Well it was a hectic shoot, but we got it in the can. I should really start by stating my role in the production, and I would if it were at all clear. As the great director said in a previous post the only way to credit this one is with a Venn diagram. I'm lobbying hard for First Assistant Director and Executive Producer, it'll just look better on IMDB." (MARK: YOU'LL TAKE WHATEVER FECKIN' CREDIT YOU'RE GIVEN)

"Now, on to the weekend. I flew in at ridiculous o'clock on Friday morning, having slept somewhere in the region of three hours. This lack of sleep was to become a recurring theme for the weekend for both Mark and myself. Considering the shoot was Saturday and Sunday I expected a leisurely morning in Wales, followed by some light preparation work in the evening. This was my first mistake."

"Being as I am a pessimist there may appear to be some negativity in this post but since this was at least in part a learning experience I see no harm in that."

"Friday was spent hunting down props and catering supplies while my body begged me to have a little nap. When the afternoon came we took delivery of the rented equipment. Although Mark owns the camera (the rather excellent Canon XL1, watch 28 days later if you don’t believe me) there were a number of other pieces of equipment rented by Mark without which the shoot would have been impossible specifically an excellent tripod, condenser mic and boom and cables and adapters to connect the mic to the camera."

"The first, albeit minor setback was the lack of a microphone mount for the boom, although a trip to a local electronics shop and £6 solved this one.
As the evening wore on Mark and I sat down to do the shooting schedule for Saturday and Sunday. Mark had already painstakingly storyboarded the shoot, so we expected this to be a doddle and finished in twenty minutes. Big fucking mistake. After about half an hour of discussing how the hell we were going to do it (note, 10 minutes longer than we expected the whole thing to take) we decided to break up the schedule between technical shots and performance (note we have no idea if these terms are industry recognised, or even make sense to the readers of this blog, but that’s what we called them so I'll run with it now."

"The shots without dialogue seemed the logical place to start so that we could get accustomed to using the camera on location without having to think about sound or keeping the fucking boom out of shot (this proved to be a problem later.). As far as the schedule went the tech shots were easy, Mark knew what he wanted there, we grouped them by setup and got them on paper. The performance shots were... not so easy. From our (admittedly meagre) previous experience we knew that takes that seemed perfect on the day could be completely fucking unusable for reasons of lighting and sound among others. For this reason we initially discussed trying to get four good takes of every shot to provide more editing options. Mark wanted to shoot the dialogue scenes as one long take from different angles. This led to complications both for the schedule and during the shoot (more on this later. ) we worked out that to get four good takes the way he planned we would have to spend an hour and a half shooting these scenes, not including bad takes or setup time. Considering we were shooting outdoors using only natural light in practice we realised this would mean spending th better part of four hours shooting only these scenes, which would not be possible. Thus we compromised and broke up the scenes a little and satisfied ourselves with 3 good takes."

"Three hours after sitting down to our twenty minute task we were done for the night having only managed to write the schedule for day one. Lesson for the future, small simple jobs can balloon very fucking easily."

PETER IS TOO PROLIFIC JUST TO WRITE ONE POST. FUCKING WRITERS. MORE FRON HIM SOON.


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