Final Week of Pre-Production
It's been a while! As I write this, we've already began editing having finished the shoot - but I'm going to pretend that it is still Monday 25th and I'm not ridiculously behind in writing these. But lets start by talking about the final week before production began.
Realising we only had a few hours left where we would all see each other before the shoot, we set to work hard on Monday (I even wrote the previous blog post early in the morning to give me more time later!). Alex completed the two newspaper cover props, as Robert worked frantically to finish the shot list. In the meantime I wrote a new scene - X22 - to be shot on the Wednesday at college as our 'news studio'. This scene was designed to make the main character of Dave feel like crap about not getting any credit for the public reveal of the Director, but it didn't come without a whole barrel full of references!
The following Wednesday we shot scene X22, with me in the role of the newsreader. We had planned originally to shoot the scene in the college's boardroom but we were told on Tuesday that it wasn't ready and so we planned to shoot it on the green screen instead. This later proved to be a massive pain in the ass in editing despite our best efforts to light the green sheeting well, it even turned out that the boardroom was ready when we shot it on Wednesday but were failed to be informed in time.
Another issue we encountered was the equipment. A lot of what we wanted in terms of sound recording had gone missing from the college AV room. We had to improvise using a cheap RODE attached to a camera for the newsroom audio, whilst the rest of the equipment was located. It worked well enough though - after all Dave is meant to be watching the news on his smartphone so it shouldn't sound great anyway.
With the scene shot, we frantically tried to edit it ready for the following Monday. In hindsight this was wasted time, as it was an impossible task with the difficulty of the green screen. We did have some breakthrough on the Friday though, the equipment all magically reappeared in AV! Robert ran about between all the cupboards like a kid in a candy store coming up with ways we could use equipment to help us in ways the objects were never designed to be used! We packed all the kit into some bags and hopped on the next bus to Norwich to drop it off ready for the following week. Our tutor Josh had kindly offered us his office as a place to store the equipment over the weekend, to save us from coming back into college on the Monday morning. Then Robert and I relaxed after a busy week by watching the new Jungle Book at the cinema. I don't know why I'm telling you all of this when there's so much more useful information I can write instead, but maybe it is a good insight to how we worked on this project; lots of hard work, but always with a little time to enjoy it.
Jungle Book, by the way, was a very good film. I couldn't help be distracted by the extreme blurriness of the film footage, but the story remained to be incredibly well told. The film also partially served as a good omen for filming - as the venue we were shooting made a play of the Jungle Book just last year, which I had some involvement in.
The weekend was spent gathering props. I managed to negotiate my way into my old school to source a few props, including Dave's broken light (it was truly broken as well, as the one I found didn't even have a bulb in it!), some cables, and a whole bunch of tape. I wasn't able to gain access to any of the wireless microphones the school has - so I quickly bought a lapel microphone from Amazon (I had wanted one for a long time anyway). Then it was a matter of purchasing some batteries, and raiding my mum's tool box to complete the prop list.
We were ready. At least we thought we were... but that's for next week's blog post... ;) Thanks for reading!
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