It's not easy being green.

It has been crazily busy over the last few weeks, so I'm playing catch up with the blog posts at the moment. We really had to hustle to get ready for the shoot due to much of our crew being involved in shooting for another short film the week before we were due to shoot. As well as this, some of the crew were sick or absent during the term break. But we have some footage in the can now so that's something to celebrate.

I'm actually just going to blog about the last couple of weeks then I'll do a separate catch-up post regarding the previous few weeks I missed. A bit of non-linear blogging, post-modernism at it's best.

The last couple of weeks have been all about finding a soundstage. There's a story behind that, but I'll leave that for the next blog post. #suspense #applyingscreenwritingtechniquestoeverydaysituations.

It has taken what feels like an eternity to find a suitable place to use as a soundstage. I didn't think it would be that hard to find somewhere as there are hundreds of empty/unused spaces in Invercargill. However, we did have a very specific set of requirements which has to be met and the main problem has been finding somewhere that has ticked ALL of the boxes.

We needed to find a place that...
1. Could accommodate our greenscreen which is 10m wide and 8m wide (although only using 5m width would have been fine as well).
2. Had power connected (and enough sources for us to draw from since lighting the greenscreen and the actors will require a lot of power).
3. Had enough space for us to separate our actors and sets from the greenscreen so we can do a proper key in post-production.
4. Had a dirt floor or a concrete floor we could cover with tarps and put a dirt layer on to - this was important as it's very difficult to do pull off a greenscreened floor. The actors tend to look like they are floating.
5. We needed a place that would also allow us to keep our sets and greenscreen set up for a few weeks and to allow us to film weekday evenings and weekends, otherwise the logistics would have been a nightmare.

In hindsight, considering the checklist of things we needed to cover, maybe it's not such a big surprise that it took so long to find something. The problem wasn't so much that we couldn't find places big enough, it was that most of the places had rafters or beams that came down to a much lower level than the roof. Either that, or the buildings were already being used for storage, or the shape of the building made it impossible to hang the greenscreen flat.

Here are a few of the places which didn't quite work out for us:

After a while it became clear we would need a bigger team of scouts to cover all of the places on the list: (apologies for the quality of the image!).

But we did eventually find a woolshed that very graciously allowed us to use a unoccupied space. Here are some pics of the place we scouted.

Also this week, I've been trying to promote our PledgeMe campaign a bit more since we only have a few more days left to go. We have hit our target (which is great news!) but we any extra funds we get will allow us to make a better film (and compensate some people who have done us some massive favours!).