It's been a while.
I know I said that I'd be doing these posts every week on Thursdays, however, the progress of the film stagnated over half term holidays. I was originally going to wait for Thursday to roll around to make this post, but so much has happened over the last few days that I shifted the post's release to today to keep up with the pace of production.
Monday 17th April 2023
I found out that one of my actors had decided to drop out. Thankfully, I had a contingency plan to fall back on: before half term, my script for the film had been deliberately leaked to the other media classes by Adrian, leading to several other students from those classes showing their interest in the film. From there, I spoke to some of the students and gathered a group of students from the media A-Level class to be actors in case anyone would drop out. That plan worked out perfectly as I was able to replace the actor that dropped out very quickly.
Tuesday 18th April 2023
I spoke to the contingency actors and organised a read-through the following day. The meeting went well and the actors seemed quite enthused.
I did a second location recce and decided to switch locations for the film. Originally, I wanted to film it at The Red Brick Building in Glastonbury, however, I had concerns about commutes for the cast and crew. After giving it some thought, I realised that I had the perfect location right on my doorstep: Strode Theatre's cafe bar. This location is a great meeting place for students both in the film and in real life, and it meant that the filming location is a brisk two-minute walk from Strode Media Department International Inc.
I also managed to gather a crew together. This was done through the allure of free pizza.
Wednesday 19th April 2023
Today, Strode College did the impossible: they remembered the media department exists.
They decided to purchase a new camera for the department after the last camera was stolen by an unknown ne'er-do-well. At first, I just thought "Oh that's cool" and carried on with my day, however, I decided to take a look at the camera and realised that it could be perfect for this project. My original plan was to use the Sony Alpha ZV-E10 as the only camera, which admittedly would complicate shot-reverse-shot moments when filming, however at the time it seemed right. Today I initially changed plans to utilise my phone (Apple iPhone 12 Pro) as a secondary camera as it could also shoot in 4K 25fps, but everything changed when the new camera arrived. Unlike the current government, the college decided to deliver on levelling up and gave us an upgraded version of the stolen camera. The new camera is a Canon XA50, and this one can film in 4K 25fps. This camera will be a game changer for my film for several reasons: the quality that matches my other camera, and the fact that it can film in CLog (Canon's version of SLog) means that I will have the same level of creative freedom over the shots from this camera as I will on the Sony camera. But the best thing about this camera is that it accepts XLR audio jacks. In layman's terms, that means I will be able to plug the boom mic directly into the camera rather than having to use an external audio device like a TASCAM.
In other news, another one of my actors dropped out today. That is alright though, as I previously established my contingency plan meant that I had another actor lined right up. Because of that, I was able to do a script read-through today and it went off without a hitch. (the script readthrough can be viewed here https://youtu.be/KH_1fPFBOV8)
What's next?
Next Monday, production will finally begin on this short film and you can guarantee I'll be milking the hell out of it for blog posts. Overall, I am unfathomably excited for where this project goes as it finally feels like it's all coming together!
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