Monday 27 April 2015

Filming Week: Day 2, Wednesday

(images to be added)

Wednesday's film shoot was full of promise.  We actually had a good day of filming, and manged to spring back despite some issues and get a lot of filming done.  As my own worse critic though, I have to look at the areas where the day could have gone better and part of that was in the planning.

On Tuesday, after we had packed up, headed home and reviewed the footage I got stuck into the call-sheets.  I wanted to get them out as quick as I could, but I still spent a bit of time tweaking some details to try and make sure that people weren't being called to early or too late.  I reviewed the movement order as well.  I felt quite confident that some of the scheduling issues from the day before had been sorted.  I clearly have much to learn.  Notably that no matter how good things look on paper, something will always go wrong in practice.



Once again I took the equipment van out early.  We were meant to arrive on set at around the same time as the other van load, except we started early to give us time to get packed up.

The other Van was a bit late, and since they had the tent and gazebos we really couldn't do anything but wait.  Once they arrived we had the extra hands so we got stuck in getting set up.  Lee was a bit too helpful, and almost forgot to leave and pick up the next lot of people :)  So I decided to go to unit and get the food started while she went back to town.  I was worried that we would have a repeat of the late lunch situation.


Camera and Lighting were all ready to go at 10:00am, our scheduled filming time.  We had caught up after our delay that morning.  Our actor had arrived, our crew was mostly there... except for the art department.  They were meant to have arrived on set just before 9am, along with the costume.

We made the best of the situation and decided to film plates for VFX while we waited.

A bit after 9:30 we manged to get some reception to find out what was going on.

It turned out that our transport for them was late that morning, and then on top of that couldn't find one of the people they were meant to bring to set.  It turned out that there had been an unavoidable family situation, but those of us on set had no way of knowing this.

By the time the remaining Art Department got on set, we were well behind schedule again.  To make matters worse, it was discovered after they got to set that half the costume had been left behind.  Luckily our other actor was on set now and her costume was complete so we managed to get more filming done during the time it took to fix our costume issues.



All things considered, we worked well together to get things back on track.  I was really happy at how the crew worked together to get us back on track in the morning and then again with all the other hiccups of the day.

But lunch was still very late... and it was reaffirmed to me that it is really hard to keep crew morale up when there is so much waiting around and people are hungry.

I actually think that this was a big factor in the growing tensions on set towards the end of the day (just before we FINALLY went for lunch), that spilled over onto our third day of filming.  When people no longer have their own jobs to do, they tend to start getting in the way of other people's.

  

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