End of Year Films - The Root of Love

So our end of year films have been completed, we've been to the film festival and it feels like the year is winding to a close now.

I was assigned the role of Lighting/DOP on Meg's film, The Root of Love. So for the first week or so I didn't have a great amount of work to do on the pre-production side and most of the work at this stage was done by our three producers in getting locations and actors etc. Auditions were set up with RSAMD students and Glasgow Acting Academy actors and at the end of the casting process, Meg decided on two actors for the lead roles. In the second week of pre-production, Meg and I then had a number of meetings to start constructing a shot list and storyboard for the film. This turned out to be a lot longer a process than we first expected as we tried to write down and draw different options for shots of every action in the script.

We had some production setbacks as well not long before we were due to film which made things quite difficult. Firstly, Silverburn shopping centre decided to wait over a week to inform us that they didn't want us to film there, despite Murray contacting them regularly about it. So we had to find another location only three or four days before we were due to film. Glasgow Fort was one of the locations that had responded very positively to us so when Silverburn gave us the knock back we decided to go on a visit to the Fort shopping centre that evening. After a walk around we discovered a hot dog vender directly across from a fruit market stall in a very spacious area - it appeared to be the perfect location for our film. So, thinking fate had given us a helping hand, we informed Glasgow Fort management that we would be filming on Sunday and Monday and they couldn't have been more helpful to us.

The next setback came on the morning before filming when we had a full crew meeting in Flick's flat. The lead male actor decided to cancel on us less than 24 hours before filming which turns out to be a bit of a production nightmare. So for the rest of the day, with 2 out of 3 of our producers at work, Meg and Kelsey spent their time frantically e mailing and phoning every actor they could get their hands on. Eventually, they managed to get their hands on someone for the role, an actor who had previously worked with some people in the class who were helping with Being Victor.

So on the Sunday morning we all woke up bright and early and met at the academy at 8:30. Murray's dad had kindly agreed to help taxi different crew members and kit to the location. When we arrived there, some of us started setting up the props and posters along with the smoothie table. Meg and I then started walking around the location discussing where each of our different shots would be. On set with us that day was a DFTV4 student, Gillian, who was there as a kind of directing mentor to Meg. This turned out to be a good help for myself and Meg who had probably gone a bit trigger happy with the whole shot list idea. Julie helped us decide that you don't really need about 4 different angles for every single action of the script and this is only necessary for the more important sequences. Overall, the first day was a great success and we were surprisingly good at keeping on schedule. In fact, the day wrapped at around 5 o'clock which is quite crazy. I can't think of any significant setbacks at all. In the morning just as we were setting up Amarillo starting blaring out of the shopping centre speakers which we realised would be a major problem for sound but after a jedi wave of Murray's hand they were more than happy to turn it off for the day. At the end of the day, Glasgow Fort even allowed us to store all the kit we wanted in different rooms over at the management centre.

The second day followed much of the same pattern as the first. The most noticeable difference was that we didn't have nearly as many people on set as all the extras and Gillian were not present. So that meant more pizza for all at lunchtime! We worked very efficiently today again and I feel we probably got better shots as well as we didn't feel under too much pressure from the time and we were more used to everything by this point. Just before lunch we had a small difficulty with putting a specific part of a scene into practice and we had to break for lunch to rethink what to do. We managed to pull our creative brains together and find a solution to the problem though, the only problem about this was it required me to stand in as an extra and pretend to fall into our actress with a hotdog and smear tomato sauce over her face. After about 12 takes I kind of felt like the guy out of Chewin' the Fat who can't act to save himself.

Overall, I think the two days' filming went very well and it was a great experience. Everyone worked really well together on and off set. I've had a look at Flick's rough cut off the footage and it all looks really good, can't wait to see the finished product now.