Yesterday I went to Beaconsfield to work on a short anti smoking campaign which is to be submitted to the Kodak Film school competition. I'm told that the rules for the competition were slightly different this year in that you had to submit the brief for your film to Kodak and they then decide which of the films submitted will go through into production. The NFTS had 13 briefs accepted to go through into production this year which is an incredible effort that show's the high standards of NFT's students. But due to the financial situation at the moment the NFTS didn't have enough money to give each of the 13 groups the normal £1000 budget for there productions and instead had to make their shorts for £600. So with just over half the regular budget things were going to be a little more difficult for the participating filmmakers from the NFTS. With 13 groups going into production, the NFTS had to organize the shoots so that each group would not have to fight for equipment but still have enough time to finish their productions and submit them by the December 16th deadline. Each group was assigned a day in which to shoot their film, the day that was assigned to the group I was focus pulling for being the 14th of November. How ever, having only found out on the 12th that our brief had been accepted it didn't leave a lot of time to get a crew together and sort out all that is necessary to make a production work. But they managed to get it all sorted, and when I turned up at 9 am we were all ready to shoot.
The weather forecast did not look good for the weekend so I was a little bit concerned when I was told that it was to be all exterior shots. But the weather was fine first thing Saturday morning in Beaconsfield, so we went to the pub gardens where we would be shooting and set up ready for the first shot. All was well, we were just blocking through the actions when the heavens opened and gale force winds picked up. There were umbrellas blowing all over the place and our gaffer was chasing poly boards around the garden, things did not look good. After a quick H.O.D meeting it was decided that we could not film in this location, we were going to have to move indoors. It being an anti smoking campaign going indoors was less than ideal as you can no longer smoke inside public places!
With storms raging outside we went to our new location and got set up ready to go. The location wasn't great and I don't think our Director of Photography Phil Moreton was to happy about it, but it was this or nothing. Despite this, shooting went really well, there were no problems through out the day. The actors were great and the crew were all really on form. I hope that the film looks good and that they do well in the competition. For more information on the competition please check out the kodak site:
Iv posted a few production pictures along with this post, I hope you enjoy sorry it was such a long one this time!
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