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.