Moderately well-laid plans of mice and men go slightly awry

Tuesday – Shooting day

Now I thought we were pretty well planned and prepared for our film shoot. The main actors had their scripts and had learnt most of their lines, we had a shot list and had storyboarded most scenes. The props and costumes were all packed up neatly in crates and I had gone through with Matt the exact details of each location down to what types of lighting each room had and which walls/corners etc would be good to use for various shots.

Naturally, it was all too good to be true. So when we pulled up at school at 9am ready to start our first scene, I was a little surprised to see that there were several huge trucks behind a row of orange traffic cones next to the main admin building.

They were of course concrete cutting with jack hammers and other incredibly noisy machinery. I scampered around the key locations I was planning to use. The grinding rumble sound move from deafening in the conference room and staff office area (scratch 2 scene locations) to vaguely irritating in the office and kitchen (still too loud for film – scratch another two locations). Matt and I walked over to the Hall which we were planning to use for the ‘dancing with the dogs’ scene and, to our complete lack of surprise, it was unusable as well.

We sent some texts around and got the cast/crew to meet us in D block. Thankfully the other half of the school was free from sound. We used one of the Geography rooms for our office (just had to carefully pull out several maps from the wall), the gym as the hall, the Year 13 student centre* as the conference room and office area.

We started filming the first few scenes in the quiet haven of D block and got through a lot of script at quite a pace.

Unfortunately, then we found out the two of our lovely male models could not (or would not in one case) be around for filming. This meant that our Camera operator Matt had to act not just as one character but two in the modelling scene. We decided to reschedule shooting that until last so that Matt didn’t get held up taking off make-up and costumes when we needed him.

We got quite a bit done in the morning and then at 12 the concrete cutters took a lunch break. We decided to seize the opportunity and moved over to the main block quickly for the Plastic Surgery Grandmas and Kitchen interview scene.

I had been pretty keen on having at least a cameo in the film. I got to be the Plastic Surgery Grandma. Worst makeup ever. And I did it to myself. I’m pretty used to wearing makeup but the amount of stuff I had caked on for this felt very unpleasant. I also had ludicrous fake boobs but the floral dress seems to have obscured the ridiculously huge breasts on film.



So we were walking over to the main block with one person dressed as a nurse with a giant injection and me with comedy boobs, floral dress and hideous make-up. Such a Kodak moment. We got to the conference room and opened the door only to find a group of students were in there planning activities for Youth Week. They were a little surprised** to be invaded by teachers clad in their unusual costumes. We chucked them out to set up but a couple hung around to watch the scene. We shot that scene very quickly. But I, always hungry for more screen time, added the line ‘I can’t feel my lips’ to the scene, so now I have a speaking part.

We finished all the scenes except the night break in one by about 5pm. We were exhausted. It was a good kind of tired though. It felt like we had got a lot done and had heaps of fun. My sides hurt from laughing at some points. The funniest point for me was probably we I decided to be OTT photographer at Matt while he was modelling. I was strange but hilarious. "Ah, yeah, that's it. Now give me seductive. Yeah, now you're innocent, a good girl. Yeah, now fierce. Ooh, you're wild animal."

We decided that we would have a couple of hours break for dinner and rest and then the actor required would come around to our house film the break in scene after dark. This gave enough time to capture all our footage (just 2 tapes when filming with two cameras***) and have showers and much needed food. The break in scene was relatively easy (although we discovered that it takes _many_ lights to make one after dark shot visible). We had finished the filming by 7.45pm. Yay!

* Given the cleanliness of students this did have the unfortunate result of one of the scene in the TVO network offices having very dirty windows. Obviously, networks cannot afford as good as cleaners as they used to.

** Although probably not as surprised as they should have been. I seem to be developing a reputation for being weird.

*** We discovered that our microphone was not compatible with the Sony camera we were using, so I operated the nice Sony 3CCD and Matt used our camera with the microphone and got more close-ups and hand-held footage that worked quite well in some scenes.

Trial 48 hour film

As a fledging team in the 48 hour film competition, our team has decided that we needed to test ourselves by trying to put together a 48 hour film between 7pm Monday and 7pm Wednesday this week. I asked Sam and Luke to provide us with the ingredients and genre just to add the random suspense element. Sure enough, I was provided with a sealed envelope which I opened at 7pm on the dot with the writing team (which is really the bulk of the team who aren’t away on holiday or busy). Our ingredients were: Character – Lynsey Rogers – a compulsive risk-taker Line – “I’ve done this a million times before.” Prop – toothbrush Genre – Reality TV We started brainstorming ideas, first talking about Reality shows we could put a spin on and then making up some crazy new ones. We quickly decided that we wanted to focus on the host or hosts of Reality TV and combine behind-the-scenes with snippets of the actual show. For a while we were certain that we were going to have two hosts – one the adventurous, risk-taker and the other more business-minded and practical. As we talked through the storyline it seemed that it was proving too difficult to have two opposing hosts that work together to pitch a new show yet are in conflict over their different styles. The non-risk-taker character also seemed hard to pin down. Thankfully one of the team made the really simple suggestion that it would be clearer if there was one host. We decided that the other character was the manager. That meant that the manager could be conservative and business minded but still working with the host for the pitch. The rest of the storyline and structure came together quickly after that. We decided to cast the Geography teacher as the manager. She has a broken leg at the moment so it meant that we would mostly have that character sitting down for interviews and one hand held shot of her hobbling after Lynsey at the end. We also wrote the broken leg into the script by having a scene of Lynsey tandem-parachuting with the manager where we could use the line “I’ve done this a million times before.” This would show Lynsey being a risk-taker outside of work as well. The main reason was that one of the team member’s husband is a sky-diver and we knew we had the gear. After about 50 minutes of brainstorming and then planning the story outline plus a few key scenes and how we might shoot them, we started writing. It felt good to have the first scene in the first draft going as the clock turned 8 o’clock. Our premise was that Lynsey is a host of many risky B-grade Reality TV shows and after being out of work for a few months her manager and her were having a reality show made about their attempts to pitch a new show to the TVO network. It would be done as a combination of interviews with Lynsey and the manager, clips of her about to pitch and flashback segments from her previous shows. Matt was good at making sure we discussed practical considerations (how would you film that, what would the audience actually see to understand what was happening) as we went. It was easy to get into some pretty crazy ideas for reality TV shows but we tried to keep coming back to ideas that would be easy enough for the audience to ‘get’ from a few second clip. Either the title had to convey the idea and/or you needed a strong visual to portray the concept and feel of each show. We finished the first draft just before 10 and people were getting tired and wanted to go home. We quickly discussed costumes, props and locations and arranged when and where to start the first scene the following morning. A few extras we were using were texted with times and places. After the others left, Matt and I went through and storyboarded the key scenes and flashbacks. The storyboards forced us to be very specific about what we had in mind for how each scene would be shot and cut, and hopefully that time will pay off in terms of shooting and editing. Technically it shouldn't be too hard (well the interviews are just piece to camera style), we just have a few crazy set-ups and costumes for the flashbacks to shows. There are only a couple of scenes that have slightly tricky camera movement. I then packed up a crate of the props we needed to take and Matt designed and printed out the TVO logo and another picture that was needed for a scene. We are pretty much a team of 5 this time with an assortment of various people coming in as extras for different flashback scenes. I’m looking forward to the shoot today but I’m actually quite nervous considering it isn’t the real thing. Matt and I both woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep before 6.30, which, in the holidays, is definitely sign of nerves or excitement or both.

One more day to go!

Just one more day until the Easter holidays. Hurrah! The chocolate, the sleep-ins, the not going to work! Such joy to be had. The last few days have been ridiculously busy crammed with insanity such as two nights of Parent-Teacher interviews and overnight marking of 31 creative writing assessments! Nearly over though. I must plan my Easter well and use it wisely. For far too many years have I gorged on Chocolate on Good Friday thus leaving being unable to face so much as a marshmallow Easter Egg on Sat/Sun. The problem that it boils* down to is just I just cannot handle my cream eggs anymore and there are too many delicious flavours. Bakc when I was a child, there was just the one original cream egg. Back then my chocolate eating fitness was superior. I could happily scoff 4 cream eggs and then hunt around for any other choccy to be had. These days I struggle to actually eat 1 cream egg in 1 sitting and there are so many delicious types, mad about choclate, dream chocolate, minty and original. I may have to devise a cunning plan to eat about a 1/3 of an egg and then pass it onto Matt thus allowing me to snarfle my way through a variety of cream eggs. * vague egg-related puns probably are not as effective when you are discussing Easter eggs