Little Clown

So much time has gone by (for obvious reasons) since I last had time to blog, that I can only drift vaguely over the intervening time.

Preproduction was hard work. My responsibilities as producer were mainly directed towards casting actors and extras, finding a make up person and preparing day schedules. I also helped on the other areas of production: risk assesments, call sheets, location scouting, endless reams of paperwork, and providing input on logistics. In the end, we found two great actors and a decent kid, along with a host of cheerful and happy extras. My make-up contacts fell through, so we settled for one of Gavin's contacts (although I know her brother... it's a small world). In retrospect, I feel it was foolish to think I could continue producing/directing the shooting of Dust while in pre-production for Little Clown. I am very glad I took the decision to postpone it until afterwards. I am now gearing up to begin again a week on Monday. I did, however, have a church conference which I was hosting on the Saturday which was a horrible stress for me as I had been dumped with the task of doing it (having never done anything like that before) and only then heard that my friends in the church, upon whom I would be relying for support, were all going away that weekend or were otherwise engaged. In the end it wasn't a disaster, and given the circumstances that is as much as I could hope for.

Monday: Day One
It was a bad start to the shoot. I was driving several folk there and was picking Phil up first and then the rest from the halls. Phil slept in. (He was still in bed when I arrived at the door.) Once he was into the car, ten minutes later, he managed to get us completely lost in the one way streets of the city centre. (He got us completely lost again on the way back. It's the last time I'm letting him navigate!) Arriving at the set for a production meeting at 1000(30 minutes late), Gavin and myself had to rush away again immediately after to collect various things in the centre and to deal with some paperwork. Due to heavy traffic and a bottleneck-diversion at the Colliseum, by the time we arrived back it was about 1200. Andy seemed unimpressed at how late we were in arriving at set, but time gets eaten away when you are driving around.
After grabbing a sandwich I was into my role as boom op. Despite some initial disagreements between Graeme and myself on the best way of doing things (it seems we both got some things right and other things wrong) I soon settled into the role. I enjoy being involved both on set and in logistics.
The afternoon was the outside scene. We took the risk of filming outside, despite the heavy rain we had experienced in the morning. In the end it paid off, but it was quite a high risk. All the extras turned up to play their part, and we had the rather annoying addition of three kids from next door. They had poor English, miniscule attention spans and a somewhat perverse sense of humour, spanning everything from sitting in the middle of the shot, waving at the camera to grabbing the football off the other kids and chucking it over the fence into the next close. Fortunately two of the three wandered into the close at one point. Closing the door after them, we quickly got Galina to arrange a last take, while I held the door tightly closed. I felt mildly illegal as I held the door tightly closed while two kids were on the other side fighting to get back out, but at least it meant we got the shot, and I gave them both a balloon afterward.

Tuesday
This was a long day of shooting in a rather stifling room, and the kid was not the only one getting grumpy. Tempers were short and frustration rife, but Galina kept us all to schedule and with the occasional rant and firework made sure that we didn't ponder too long over any one shot. In retrospect I think we worked the kid too hard this day.

Wednesday
This was an easier day, and there was a more upbeat mood among the crew. We were over half way there and we were only filming till 3. Lunchbreak went on too long. We finished early in the morning, and the hour's lunchbreak therefore came closer to 90 minutes and it was a real struggle to get motivated again for the afternoon's session.

Thursday
Just the last scene to do and it went moderately smoothly with some cheated juggling shots. We got the kit and props wrapped, the van hired and the flat cleaned. (Can I just put on record that I have never seen a dustier room in my life. Two whole bucket loads of compressed dirt came off that carpet. The landlady gets not too bad a deal out of this, as she would have been left with all the dust if two of our crew hadn't slept in the room for a couple of nights and we had therefore felt obliged to clean it.)

General Comments
While I think Little Clown has been a success, there were some issues, both good and bad that I think deserve to be highlighted.

1) I think Charlotte is an amazing director. Very calm and controlled and gets exactly what she wants from her actors.

2) I think the crew as a whole was too big (certainly at this stage). Communication between indiviuals and departments was a particular issue.

3) I think the camera department in particular seemed to have trouble with communication. Perhaps there was a lack of clarity in the respective roles, in the heirarchy, and in the overall plan for the day, but often I found myself frustrated by how long it was taking to set up a shot. Having said that, I have every faith that the footage we have recorded will be very good. It's more a comment on the method than on the results.

4) It's very useful having someone doing Gavin's role. Someone not involved on set particularly, who can deal with catering, with phonecalls during the day, with planning tomorrow while today is still happening. Especially having burgers ready for everyone on Wednesday lunchtime was a huge boost to morale.

5) A couple of folk said to me they hated their job and felt redundant on set. It seems to me that this was possibly sometimes to do with some confusion over their job description. Of course, there are some jobs which have less responsibility than others. But there was a tendancy occasionally for us who didn't have such strenuous jobs on set to descend into childish banter, which wound up the kid and stressed those who did have more responsibility.

6) Having folk stay on the set was really useful for maintaining focus and for ensuring that mostly everyone was ther eon time at the beginning of the day.

7) There were times (probably over 50% of the time) when the crew really seemed to be working well together, and working like a properly professional team should. These were the times when everyone concentrated on their own role without coveting someone else's, trusted others to do their own without interference and maintained good communication without descending into chat, banter or grumpiness which only distracts.


All in all, it's been a great experience, and I can't wait to see the edit.