Fire up the Quattro

So it's time to take out the old blog, rusting quietly in the corner in true steampunk style. The cogs are beginning to slowly grind together and with a whistling jet of steam it rattles into life.

Directing Broken Bubbles has so far been a rather strange experience. Some of this is due to the unique situation of working with selected A3 actors. While there are good things about this: free access to a highly talented bunch, there is a downside too: you have to work with the people you've got. If you've written a part for Tinkerbell, and the only actress is better suited to Miss Trunchball you just have to make the best of a bad job! We have not yet met the actors - though I've worked out who they all are - so I'm hoping that there won't be any mismatches of quite such exaggerated proportions.

But I think what I've found hardest is working with an Executive Producer over my head. It's great practice for the industry, but it's hard to try to keep all the Exec's happy while still feeling that I'm the author of my film. I think the fact I'm on to Draft 15 says something about that - though even the number has ceased to be mine: the executives have named it Draft 11.1. I keep telling myself that we are all committed to making the best possible film given the circumstances, and it looks as though we finally have some agreement on the script so there is light at the end of the tunnel. I'm looking forward to getting it locked down and being able to stop writing and start directing.

I am alarmed by the prospect of doing an 11 page script in 3 days, especially given the fact that the Greenscreen shots have to be shot twice, and have to be very carefully matched. Combined with the unknown quantity of the RED camera, I am going into this production with some big questions floating around as to the feasibility of attempting the shoot. Some very careful forward planning and some hyper-efficient shooting with a minimal shotlist go some way to alleviating my worries, but not perhaps far enough.

We aim to film all the scenes in the workshop as if they were one big scene. We will get all the shots from one camera angle for all the scenes, then move on to the next. My concern with using this hyper-efficient shooting schedule is that the performances will suffer. The actors will need to match performance in the reverse shot for a scene for which the original shots were taken perhaps the day before. Maybe a rigorous rehearsal process would get the performances consistent, but I fear freshness would be lost by over-rehearsing things.

Anyway I'm just rambling now, so we'll see what happens.