No Respite Productions

This blog has been very quiet because no filming has taken place recently. No filming has taken place because it's been incredibly difficult to find a date that two or more people can agree to.

 This is a very common problem with amateur film making, normally people are incredibly busy with this, that and the other. So you try to arrange something even a month away and it turns out that people have weddings/holidays/stag dos etc. It's fair enough, but it doesn't help get a film released. Even worse is the very fragmented nature of the shoots themselves, you could have one shoot booked for next week, thennot another for a months time.

So I've decided to attempt a different way of booking people's time, a method more akin to what they do in the professional industry. This involved setting a defined period for filming, which in my case is now five weeks during November -December. During these weeks my actors have to remain free of as many social appointments as possible, and prepared to do multiple shoots during consequtive evenings/days.

Hopefully this will help focus all of our effort (and the inconvenience of filming) into a single defined period, rather than the scattershot and fragmented way that has been so far.

Obviously strings are attached to this, some people may not feel comfortable in having such a large portion of time taken out of their personal calendars. Hopefully that won't put them off too much and fingers crossed by the end of the year the whole film will be in the wrap!

At the end of the day, trying to find random dates that more than two people could attend wasn't really working out. So fingers crossed this alternative trial will yield better results.

Adam

Hello there,

Quick update, the financial situation is looking better thank god, so it's now looking as though the Ring of Death film will be back in production soon enough (pending a revised and streamlined script).

In the meantime, a rough re-cut of PX 3 (now retitled Chavular) has been completed and some small visual effects and grading has been added to the overall production. A trailer should be online by Monday, and the actual film itself will no doubt be released next month once I've done whatever I can do with the sound (and my guess is... not a lot).

All looking good

Adam

Well, it's all gone a bit wrong.

We've hit a wee bit of a snag on the whole filming front. The major issue is one of finance and transport. Sadly the global downturn has hit me, and we no longer own a car as a result.

The beef I have is that it's stressful, difficult and impossible enough to try and get locations arranged and cast on board without having the added stress of wondering how the hell you are going to get there in the first place.

To which end I've had to can filming for the time being until things pick up. Fingers crossed I can do some lighter stuff in the meantime, but for now. I guess I shall have to just wait and see what happens. Last post for a while no doubt.

Hi,

Photos are now available from the photo gallery section which shows snippets from the filming that was done this weekend, and also some test composite shots with the greenscreen. Whilst the green screen works in principle I do feel that some work needs to be done with the lighting and contrast.

Also the photo that I've used as the background was something I whipped off the net so not the best thing to work with. Ideally I would have background footage recorded from my camera, and set to the same height as it was when we filmed the interior shots.

Still, we're on the right path and greenscreen asides we did get some great footage!

Adam

So how did it go?

The first day of filming for the Ring of Death movie was a mixed affair.

It's probably best to get the things that went wrong with the shoot out of the way first...

• Me - I went wrong, or at least my expectations of how much we could film in the day. I completely overestimated how many scenes we could do in 6 hours, which left quite a few of the actors sat around for a long time doing nothing. As it happens my leading lady spent 5 entire hours doing nothing... not an ideal way for her to spend her Sunday I'm sure.
• My occasional snapping at the actors because of my inability to gauge times correctly wasn't a great way to kick off the shoot.
• It turns out the greenscreen we are using is WAAAY too small for the fighting scenes to be done against, so it's back to the drawing board there.

But actually, that was really all that was wrong for today. The real killer was my assumption that we could do lots and lots and lots of scenes during that one period. I have learnt my lesson. It appears to be one I need to relearn at the very beginning of each shoot but at least it's out of the way.

What went right...

• The footage we did manage to capture (two and a half scenes worth) was excellent, the actors did an absolutely stand up job and I've captured some great moments. They were all absolutely brilliant in their roles.
• We made a start on the filming! I consider that a huge positive!
• It turns out the patchy sound capture set-up I've created did the job just fine. Apart from some weird memory bleeds out of audacity when it's been running for too long, we got some real nice and crisp audio. Miles better than anything we'd get from the camera.
• The greenscreen set up itself looked quite impressive and I think I got the lighting just right. Although time will tell as to how good the chromakey will work. More on that soon!

So pretty much that covers my very first shoot. Only other thing I'd add is that next time I'm going to throw a few extra quid and get some buffet type foods from the shops to feed the actors with. I had provided bisuits, but an extra tenner to make sure they were well fed during the shoot would have really improved morale and meant that they would not have had to trek to Subway in the windy cold!

Hopefully we'll be filming the shoot later on this week, hopefully a total success story then!

Cheers,

Adam

Hello all,

Not really had any time at all to update this blog, and this is down to the fact that pre-production has been the only thing on my mind as we enter the production phase.

All I'll say is I've spent a fortune so far, consumed vast amounts of time trying to get this whole thing underway and still have a million more things that need doing before I head off tomorrow AM with all my gear in tow for our first shoot over in Gloucester Docks.

I've been busy working on acquiring lights for the green screen filming, my character's costume, making sure all the cast know what's going on... amongst all of that I have tried to storyboard as much of the film as I could but sadly only a small fraction has been done. It will be intersting to see how smooth the filming goes with storyboarded scenes vs. non-storyboarded scenes but somehow I don't think I'll be surprised at the results.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll have lots of notes and pictures to upload. Here's hoping anyway! I aim to try and blog some realtime snapshots of the filming process with my phone so stay tuned.

I should probably mention that the main tools in my armoury for tomorrow are...

1. My own annotated version of the script with all my shooting notes and plans
2. A Call sheet showing cast and props for each scene that we've planned to film.
3. Storyboards of the scenes (where completed).
4. Tape Measure for the greenscreen shots, which will allow me to move the camera to the right height and distance when filming the background footage.
5. Paper towels for those "messy" shoots
6. Tea, coffee and biscuits for my hard working cast.
7. A set of cards to keep non-active members busy during shoots.
8. An 8 in 1 handy tool
9. Masking and duct tape.
10. Webbing and strapping for locking stuff (you never know) down in place.

Wish me luck! Keep your eyes peeled as I plan to update more frequently now that we've begun filming, this was always supposed to be a diary anyway!

Adam