Pics yo!

So, today we had our second film session. We enlisted the help of photographer extraordinaire Phoebe W to take some shots of us in action... here are most of them now, there might be a few more later.

I think that it went fairly smoothly, at least it did for the parts I was able to attend. It sucks that the only day we are able to film is wednesday, when I have Maths Methods in the morning, and Physics in the afternoon! However, I was there for around an hour of shooting at lunch, and before school to help set up.




This was the basic set up for the set, although we did tweak it a fair bit, and brought in 3 more set of lights.. not to mention a big desk and two chairs! don't have those pics at the moment though.
More of the same. The set looked really excellent through the cameras, these stills don't really do it justice.
This is the set after some more lights plus some props have been added. Thats Daniel J in the picture, he was acting for us today, in the part of Neil.

Just another pic of us getting the set ready

Daniel L setting up the HD camera

And again..

The DDR Productions team!

It's good that things went pretty smoothly today.. I was expecting the worst, but it seems that we didn't go too badly. I guess we'll see how good it was tomorrow when we get to have a look att the footage.

We have another film session planned for the same time next week, where we are hoping to wrap up the filming.

I hate actors!

It's been a while since I made an entry in my journal, so I guess now would be a good time to fill everyone in!

We at DDR Productions spent a few days in the holidays trying to organise ourselves in preparation for our first filming session. There was a hell of a lot of things that still needed to be done before we were ready to shoot. We still needed to organise lights, (we needed a lot of lights!), and we needed to build the set. Dan got the wood to constuct the sets from the Margate tip, and I went around to his place to help construct the set. I ended up driving out to the eastern shore to try and pick up some lights with Daniel Livingston, but his uncle wasn't home, so we couldn't get lights from there. Luckily Dan S managed to get some lights from his dads work, plus we used some lights from the college. Unfortunately, I could be there for the actual filming day as I had an unavoidable commitment, and the date of filming couldn't be changed.

Another drama we had in the days leading up to filming was that one of our two main actors had to pull out due to other commitments, which left us feeling mighty stresed out just days before filming! We were really disappointed, mainly because this person had agreed to act in our film previously, and because he pulled out so close to the filming date. In the end, we managed to find someone else to fill the role, but this person was more of a last resort, as we didn't know how well he could act. As it turns out, he couldn't act very well, and he didn't even look at the script until he turned up for filming. Don't get me wrong, we all really appreciated that he could help us out of a tight spot, but I guess we all would have appreciated a heads up on his lack of previous acting experience, and a bit more of an effort to learn the script.

I've seen the footage that we got from that day, and I have to say I was very impressed with how the set looked. I'll try and get a clip or some still shots up for you, it actually looked a lot better than I thought it would.

Since that filming day in the holidays, we've come to realise that it's no longer realistic to expect to complete the film - a combination of a lack of time, coupled with the logisctics of some of the things that we wanted to do. While this is disappointing for all of us, it's just no longer a realistic expectation. We've decided that we will focus instead on trying to get the "oblivion" scene completed instead, which it seems will be a big enough task by itself.

Another complication which has presented itself in recent weeks was that fact that another of our actors is unable to film on weekends, which presents a problem as it was pretty much the only time that we would have been able to have got a large slice of filming done. As it is approaching the end of the year, I can't miss out on any of my classes at this point. So it presents us with a problem. At the time of writing, we have a room in A block booked for our next filming session tomorrow. At this stage we're all set, but I'm sure something will screw up between now and tomorrow. Judging by our previous luck, it is a certainty. We've changed on of our actors around (the one that could act was basically not available when we needed him anyway), which may or may not turn out to be a disaster. I guess we'll have to wait and see. Let's just say that we all have our reservations.

Until next time!

Not done with yet!

Well, yet another week has passed, and I'm pleased to say that we're having some very pleasing progress. We've now finished the script, and other membes of our team have been scouting for filming locations, in time for shooting in the holidays. One thing I know that we're all a little worried about is the fact that we haven't yet had our actors read through the script, which is obviosly an important step. Obviously, it's best to get the actors involved as early as possible. I think that we should be able to get it to them this week, and hope that they like what they read...

So far, we are on track for our main production goal at the end of term, which was to be ready to film in the holidays. We had previously discussed how filming in the holidays was basically as late as we could leave it - any later and we would have had to abandon our ambitions to film our project, and instead try and polish the script as much as possible and use that as our final assesment piece. At this stage we shouldn't need to do that, as we are still sticking well to our proposed timelione for the rest of the year.

I guess for the rest of this week we will be busy preparing ourselves for filming in the holidays. I haven't had a chance to discuss the specifics with my other team members at this stage.

Oh, and by the way, I do plan to put up at least one scene of the script for people to read if they wish... or some of our other work, anyway. Got to get it of Dan's laptop, so i will put it up when I get the chance.