About to walk backwards thru pretty woods all day with the Steadicam as a vicar type person does a walk 'n' talk sermon-y piece to camera. [link]2010/09/07
RT @Alan100: Got the wrong number for the runner today and rang andrew marr to order a cup of tea. #fail[link]2010/09/06
@4KDIT Genuine question: do enterprise level backup systems in say, Fortune 500 companies use checksums in their standard workflow? Sources? [link]2010/09/06
The final day of Jane Doe.¬† During pre production producer Rob Davies was very patient with my increasingly tedious series of “oh, you know what else I need” requests and managed to magically procure *everything* I asked for, which to be frank was something of a shock.
Especially when Phil and I had to load the whole load into a 3.5 ton van, nearly filling it to the brim.
My only promise was that at some point, I’d use everything, and day four of the shoot was the perfect opportunity, with a lengthy dialogue scene in a single location being the vast majority of the day’s schedule.¬† It was clearly time to adopt a typical DoP strategy: ‘get away with the wide, then make it look even prettier for the coverage’.
We wrapped the Armoured Land Rover shoot late on Thursday evening (pictures and video to come, they’re editing frantically as we speak to get it all done before the Christmas break) and producer Rachel and I hightailed it back up to the Midlands, arriving at 3am, so we could sleep in our respective own beds before pitching a concept to Somerfield the next morning in Bristol at 11.30am. Ouch. Having returned from Bristol the rest of the day was spent de-packing the equipment van from the shoot and returning the excellent PDW-700 XDCAM HD camera kindly loaned to us for the shoot by Creative Video (more on that in a later post).
Mrs Ed and I headed to her folks in Luton Friday evening which was to be our base of operations for a weekend of London-based fun.
For me, Saturday brought two pre-production meetings for a couple of shorts I’m DPing early next year: Jane Doe (D: Myles Robey, P: Robin Davies), in which a terrible accident has severe psychological consequences for the responsible party, and The Ash Can (D: Jamie Hewitt, P:Sabrina Dridje), a horror (or is it?) piece set on a WWII era marooned submarine. We’re planning to shoot both on RED, and I spent the day meeting with both production teams to plan our next steps. Myles, Robin and Sabrina are all involved in one way or another in Perrier’s Bounty, currently shooting in London, so I dropped by the set for lunch and to hang around and see the RED being used on a ¬£5 million feature. Nice to see that all the ‘oh my god it’s unreliable and unprofessional’ malarkey has died off now – other than the camera having a different logo on the side, and the complete lack of film stock and processing costs from the budget, I could have been on the set any 35mm mid-budget picture in the world.
Saturday night was a party with a load of Mrs Ed and I’s friends from university, and Sunday inevitably involved a lengthy recovery process involving a lie-in, lunch with Mrs Ed’s family and some extra napping beyond that…
The Tube was insane around London the whole weekend, probably due to the cold. However, it was nothing compared to Japan. I think they made need to acknowledge the place is officially overcrowded…
