Easter Break

An exhausting week, filled with intensely long filming days, location disasters, equipment miscalculations, and general intrigue... Pretty much everything we planned turned out disastrous, and things we ad-libbed turned out marvelous.

The week began with finalizing our nice little prop collection. We had some good looking spray-painted plastic guns, a plastic knife, 2 t-shirts each (1 waiting to be shredded and bloodied) and a container of fake blood. We also purchased 6 Mini DV tapes for use in the HD cameras.

Bad news arrived Wednesday morning. The decrepit old house we'd planned to use in Dromana was no longer available. I was pretty disappointed and upset about this, as I'd really been looking forward to filming there. We'd even visited it the day before and checked everything out. Luckily, Rebecca saved the day by getting permission to film at her grandmother's house instead. We didn't need to film there until Friday, but we were relieved to have an immediate substitute.

On Wednesday night, Jason, Rebecca and I gathered at my house at about 6pm in Mount Eliza to film our first scene at night. We setup the camera equipment while we waited for our extra, Sammi, to arrive.

About 15 minutes before Sammi got there, rain began to bucket down outside. Did I mention we were planning to film outside? No? Well... we were.

Determined to get the scene done that night, we decided to wait out the rain. Over an hour passed, and finally, the rain subsided. By now, the sky was pitch black, the grass was soaking wet, and the clouds above threatened new rain later on. Still, we grabbed our lights and camera and rushed out to make the most of the night.

We had to put a picnic rug out on the ground to cover the wet grass, which actually turned out to look great on camera. The powerful halogen light illuminated the entire area, which worked out well, but we had to be careful of intruding shadows.

After 2 hours, we recorded about 10 minutes of footage for a 1 minute scene. Great work! Sarcasm aside, watching the scene back on the television, we were quite pleased with how it turned out. And luckily, the rain didn't return that night.

Thursday brought us a full day and night of filming. Jason and Rebecca gathered at my house at 11am, we setup our camera, and commenced filming our interior scenes. Things were going well, but the second HD camera we had planned to pickup that day had not been returned by another filming group. We gave Mark Szota a call to see when it would come in, but there had been no word from the other group. We gave up and continued on with the one camera. It wasn't that bad, but every time we wanted a new unique shot, we had to reshoot an entire segment for continuity's sake.

We also filmed some rather excellent outdoors scenes down by the beach. The sun stayed out long enough to get some great footage.

That night, we moved our equipment to Jason's house in Seaford. Our extra for the night, Ricky, met us there and we filmed some great interior action scenes. We'd planned to use Ricky in another scene that night at another location, but it was getting very late. Generously, he offered to meet us again the following night so we could complete our scenes.

Friday was our last day of filming for the week. We'd filmed over half the movie so far, so things were looking good despite our setbacks.Luckily, things went according to plan today. We filmed from 11am at Rebecca's grandmother's house. She had an excellent old-fashioned exterior gallery that worked perfectly for one particular scene.

We managed to get our day-time exterior scenes finished just as a light rain started. We went inside once Ricky arrived, filmed his interior scenes, and by then the rain cleared up. Finally, we filmed Ricky's exterior night scenes, and managed to wrap it all up by 8pm. No setbacks that day!

So, after an exhausting week, we completed all our filming. We now have about 2 and a half hours of footage that we'll have to sift through and edit. Bring on post-production!