Day One: Finding Our Feet

As I said, my aim is to keep you abreast of how we've been trucking in our development of the film. We started shooting on the 14th. If you want a nice simple summary of how things have gone and can't be bothered trawling through the following few paragraphs, here's an easy one liner: "Extremely Well!"

DAY ONE

Arthur, Monique and myself had an early start, picking up the necessary equipment for the film at 9:30AM. This went off pretty much without a hitch and we were soon at the primary location for the shoot.

For the rest of the crew, the call was at 12:30PM. Thanks to Monique and her production design crew, the set was fully prepped for our first shot, which, typically for me, was an inordinately complex one. We have largely scheduled this film to be photographed chronologically, meaning the first shot we did was literally the first one of the movie. It involved a long shot, constantly moving and changing focus, gliding around the main character Nick's room, introducing us not only to the geography of the film, but Nick's personality and lifestyle. As with all first shots, this took us longer to achieve than we'd like, though Mr. Arthur Bienkowski and his camera crew took very little time to beautifully light the space. Our main problem was the co-ordination of movement and focus, as the shot contained so much information, as well as needing to be perfectly paced and clear for a duration of roughly 30 seconds. Not only this, but thanks to the stiflingly hot weather, we found flies to be a constant irritant, often flying into and ruining otherwise perfectly composed shots. After 11 takes, however, we finally had the shot we needed and our film had officially begun. I felt a little strange with StJohn on set, as this was really the first time he'd met a lot of the crew and I was anxious to make sure he felt comfortable. Once again, I was just over-thinking things as StJohn got along fine with the crew and, as always, took his direction exceptionally well. I very much cherish the fact that I got to cast such a well-known friend of mine for this role, as it allowed for an instantaneous intimacy in our work and I didn't have to worry about bruised egos.

We pushed ourselves hard, and thanks to Nikit's scheduling and Jacob Holmes-Brown's excellent ADing, we finished slightly ahead. Managing to get coverage for scenes 1 to 3. Our only real down-notes were an unfortunate case of food poisoning for some crew members including myself, likely brought about by bad yogurt, and some pretty significant oxygen problems on set, thanks to us failing to use ventilation. Neither problem really slowed us down and, really, what film shoot isn't without its problems anyway? We formulated a new plan to keep fans on set circulating air when we weren't recording and moved on, finishing the day exhausted but largely satisfied that we'd gotten what we intended to get in the time we'd intended to get it.