The Eye of the Storm

Doing a bit of a catch up post as I was too busy with shooting a couple of weeks ago to post anything (after our shoot, I helped out Lana and Brogan with the things they were shooting for their media culture assignments!). I haven't been able to access the BTS photos apart from a couple that went up on facebook, but I'll add some more when I can.

We are half way through production, having finished our location shoot in Sandy Point. All that's left to do is the greenscreen stuff and any pickups.

From my perspective as a producer I was happy with how the shoot went. All of the logistical things were taken care of. The weather was pretty stormy on our first proposed shooting day - heavy rain/hail, driving wind and freezing cold -  so we decided it was best not to shoot on that day. However, we had a bit of luck on the next three days, it stayed dry and calm enough to get out, and we managed to knock out all the shoots that were planned.

The only real hiccups were with a couple of bits of gear that hadn't been issued from the equipment room - unfortunately I was on another film shoot at the time all the gear went out so I didn't have much oversight on this, which was a little frustrating. But it didn't have a massive impact on the shoot. Apart from that, everything ran smoothly in terms of logistics.

I intended to take a photo of all the printing I did that week but I think it slipped my mind (storyboards, scripts, call sheets, gear disclaimers, talent release forms, sign in/out forms... the list goes on). It was a massive pile of paperwork.

On the actual shoot, I was the boom op, as we have Kyle on board this year from SIT Sound who was mixing. So basically, I just put the boom where Kyle said it needed to go. Not much more to it than that really. The footage we shot on location was sparse on dialogue, so mostly it was just ambient and foley sound we were capturing.

Boomin' up high...

Boomin' down low.
Boom's gotto go where the boom's gotto go...

This week, myself and Don have been working on matching the footage shot to the pre-visualisation. I really want our post production to run as efficiently as possible, so the first thing I did was organise the footage. It's one of those tedious tasks, but it's something that is definitely worth the effort because it ends up saving you a lot of time and hassle in the long run.

Currently, we a version that matches the shots on the pre-vis without regard to the duration specified, and we also have another which matches everything, right down to the original duration.

We also sat down with Dan and started working on a version which assumes more editorial control over the project than the versions that stick strictly to the pre-vis. We will bring this back to the team next week so we can have a discussion on what pickups we need to do. At this stage, I think there is probably enough in the edit to suggest we will need another day out at Sandy Point to fix up various things - but that's ok, we wrapped shooting two days ahead of schedule so we still have a budget to go back if we have to.

The Master List

Been a very very busy week heading in to shoot. It's currently 5am on shooting day, which means I'll have less than 2 hours sleep tonight. It's fair to say this isn't the (tiny) glamorous side of the film business. Anyways, I'm going to let me diary do the talking this week - to busy doing to talk.

Viewing our Pre-vis 

Unit Base. The Powerboat Club - Sandy point. Did a recce here and sorted out an agreement

The Return of the Interns

Again, not much to report, having just returned from an internship (intern runners). We've taken the weekend off to recharge as we were doing some long days while we were away. I can't really go into any details about that (having signed a non-disclosure agreement), I guess I can only really talk about it in general terms. From my perspective, it was certainly something I've never experienced before on a film set. The whole scale of things was quite mind-blowing - going from working on short films where you know all of the cast and crew, to something like this where there are over one hundred people (and rising by the day) scattered around in different parts of the location (and different parts of the region too) working on different jobs. I was introduced to quite a few people but because everyone is so busy we didn't really spend much time with them. Anyway, that's probably as much as I feel comfortable talking about.

As I mentioned, I haven't been able to put any time into the group project this week (outside of the internship I also had to work on other assignments). Before I left we arranged for Sarah to jump into my role until I returned. We didn't have any wi-fi access out there (except for on-site... but then we were working!) so we're a little bit out of the loop with things. Just about to head to the Tin Shed for a full team meeting so hopefully we can catch up with what has been going on.

One thing I did manage to do for the group project this week was find another couple of possible locations for the greenscreen. I found them while I was out sourcing some things on the internship. These locations are close to Tech so these would be ideal if we could come to some arrangement.

Building near Noel Leeming

Building opposite Noel Leeming