I am starting work on one of my favourite parts of the film making process.

The pickup shoot.

This is a one day shoot with minimal crew where you get all those little shots you didn’t get during the main shoot, or new shots you thought up in the edit, so as to help tell the story better. For instance, in this shot here, we never had the prop of the chewed fish hook to shoot the close up – this is a common problem when budgets are low. Hero props, that is, props that will be shown in close up, just are not up to scratch on the day as the design team have not had the time or resources to do it properly. So it gets pushed into a pickup shoot.

In Gone Fishing this also includes another common hero prop – photos – namely Bill and Emily, characters in the film, and as such, we did not have the actors before we shot, and so could not include them as an onset photo prop. We shot the photos only when the actors were present and it was too much of a rush to get the pix printed and framed in time for shooting.

The pickup shoot is planned for next Wednesday and so far there are eight shots we need. Let’s hope it’s sunny!

Now where is my blow torch, I need to bend a four inch reinforced steel fish hook to look like it was chewed by a killer pike!

Blimey!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com