Sometimes life can be cruel, especially mother nature. It was the first day of our filming weekend and everything had been set up. I thought everything would run smoothly and that it would be a breeze. But how wrong I was. I didn't notice how bad the weather was until I was loading the Z1 into my car. I didn't have an umbrella as I usually bare the rain in a hooded coat, although I had never been solely responsible for a £3000 Sony Z1 before. I thought that other members of our group would have a solid umbrella, especially as half of our team are females. I'm not being sexist, but it is a known fact girls usually have amazing umbrella's due to their hair. But not in this case. All we had were small delicate fold down ones that did not stand a chance in these conditions.
Anyhow, the first location on the schedule that Abi had drew up was the Post office. So at least we would be inside for our first scene. In the post office everything seemed to go well, apart from the constant flow of customers. But we managed to find a gap and get the shots that we needed. The ladies in their were lovely and polite, however, it was only the first scene of our two day filming weekend and I already knew that nobody else apart from Abi and Yaz would contribute to any decisions regarding the scenes and shots. In fact, rather contrary happened. As the weekend unfolded it became a constant battle to keep the attention of all the crew. At points I felt like Abi and myself were like school teachers, struggling to keep to the schedule due to other members of the cast distracting our actor and other members of the crew.
Moving onto our worst scene of the whole weekend. This was the scene outside the Job centre when the weather was at is climax. What made things harder was the fact we were still very much ammeters in setting up the equipment promptly. It was hard for me as the director to pay attention to the framing due to the worry of the Z1 getting wet, especially as droplets kept collecting on the lens. Many of our shorts on this scene had flaws, either the umbrella was falling down into shot, or their was reflections of members of the crew in windows (Yaz's white coat). I like to think that these mistakes would not have have slipped through given a normal filming environment. I hope that even in these early scenes I would have spotted these silly mistakes. However, everything improved from this point. I am proud that we covered so much ground and did all the hard slog in our first day. We finished off at my flat to complete the end of the first day. Everything seemed set for the second day. Abi had previously arranged actors for the final day, and Mike contacted us to inform us he was going to be meeting with us early the next day.
Day 2: Town
The weather was so much better than our previous day on set. However, this was another day I was dreading because I imagined that there would be at least one member of the public looking at our camera in every take. Although, looking back in hindsight, things were not as bad as I had envisioned. There were obviously takes where people did look into, but on the whole...it was good.
On the downside, everything was a struggle due to the fact both of our actors did not show up and Treds was closed when we had scheduled to film. However, we did manage with these problems by simply shuffling around the schedule and filling these acting performances by members of the cast, with me included. I do like the idea of appearing in this film as both Hitchcock and Tarantino both make performances in all their own films. Generally, I am really pleased with today, especially considering how we have overcome certain problems.
