Last year, DP Vernon Layton spent a couple of months in Cuba shooting Day Of The Flowers which is released this weekend. As you may know, Vernon is a close friend who shot ‘Gone Fishing’. I asked him to share his experiences while shooting in a tropical, hot and humid environment. Of course, insect repellent, […]
Recently I was involved in a short that was shot in London. I thought I would share some things I learned about shooting in very public places. In this instance, right in the heart of the London hustle and bustle, Oxford Street! And to be clear, we did have full permission to shoot there, and […]
Following the Guerilla Film Makers Masterclass I asked some film makers to write guest blog entries. Here’s what Andy Phelps offered… ‘My partner-in-crime, Jake Hawkins, and I have been working on our first feature full-time since January this year; victims of the recession and the need to go and do something more creatively […]
One of the problems with any image capture system, be it film or digital, is that of the available latitude. That is, the difference between absolute black and absolute white – latitude. This ‘scale’ is measured in photographic ‘stops’, (aka ‘F stop’ or ‘T stop’). As a film maker you will be familiar with these […]
A couple of weeks ago, editor and Eddie Hamilton and myself sat down and spent a whole Saturday recording a chat track over the rushes for Gone Fishing – that’s nearly three hours of unedited 35mm footage, including main unit with sync sound, second unit, pickups days and of course the high speed Phantom slow […]
After a week of shooting, we have wrapped the UK end of our large scale corporate job and sent a camera team off to the USA for another week of filming. It’s been a tough shoot so far as there have been so many locations and actors. In fact, more locations and actors than your […]
It’s a disaster… but not for us. My good friend and director, Johnny Newman, shot a film (At Home With The Finkels) late last year using the Viper Camera – a high end HD format that records data to drives and not to tape (or obviously film). That means there is no tape or film […]
Saturday morning, the day after the pickup shoot, and I am looking out of my window in amazement at the weather. According to the BBC it should be bright sun, and it’s grey and miserable. Yesterday on the other hand, the day we shot, WAS AMAZING SUNSHINE! We could not have been luckier with the […]
I spent yesterday driving a van around London collecting camera kit and lights – I love that moment when normal life ends and you step into the world of movies – that for me was yesterday when I collected the van. Cameraman Steve Brooke Smith camera along for the ride, and thank god he did […]
Gone Fishing looks absolutely amazing. In large part this is down to Vernon’s photography and his insistence that we wait on the sun. We were very lucky in the main shoot and managed to shot mostly in bright sunshine, which Vernon then filled the harsh shadows with a whopping great 15k light and bounce boards. […]
Today I collected our three and a half foot animatronic – well actually, hand puppet – monster pike. It was made by effects guru Jenny Cochrane and it weighs A TON! This fish is never going to be seen out of water, only in the murky shallows as it battles with Young Bill. We will […]
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 […]
A few years back, Robert Goodwin came on my two day film making seminar, When I asked for help on Gone Fishing, he was one of the people who answered, and in fact, kept answering and giving me reasons why he should be involved. I managed to get the photographer to shoot some pics with […]
Producer, Sabina Sattar, has spent the last week tallying up the budget. We have gone over budget. I knew we had so during the shoot as a number of problems came up and I just sanctioned them, saying we can figure out how to deal with it once we have it all in the can. […]
I spent the whole of last night with editor Eddie Hamilton as we fine cut the first assembly of ‘Gone Fishing’. We have been cutting using a Dell laptop, digitising in offline media at DV50 from DVCam, and then using a 32” domestic telly as a preview monitor. It all works flawlessly. As I mentioned […]
So the shoot is over and I spent a weekend in post shoot blues. As tough as a shoot is, the days after it can often be worse. There is also an inevitable pile of production problems, misplaced bits and bobs and dreaded bills to deal with. But most of all you miss the buzz, […]
I woke with very serious pain in my leg. At 5.15am, I wasn’t sure I would get through the day. But I knew I must. At 7am I hobbled onto location to find a largely new crew, reduced in size and looking at me slightly bemused – who was this guy hobbling onto set? What […]
This was supposed to be our final day of shooting, but it was now clear that we needed an extra day. Many people in the cast and crew chose to come back for the extra day, but some had other work they needed to do. I was touched by the enthusiasm everyone showed, especially those […]
The post mortem on Day 3 highlighted some key areas where we could tighten up the shoot. If we continued the way we shot on Day 3, we would need two weeks to complete. DP Vernon Leyton had a chat to his camera team and they worked out a few ways to move a little […]
So I survived the shoot. Just. I have ended up in Casualty, but more on that later. We wrapped Gone Fishing Last night… I had promised to keep up in the blog, but by day three, it was apparent I could not. And so I am going to write it now, day by day, just […]
Today and yesterday were as expected, REALLY TOUGH. Yesterday, we spent the whole day in Ealing Studios on stage 3, where we had built a set. Most of the highly charged and emotional scenes took place in the set and so from a directors point, it was a wonderful day. Lynn Blakely, who plays Emily, […]
Day one. Highs and lows. We have been very fortunate as pretty much uniformly, we have an excellent and very professional crew. I bonded very much with Johno, our first AD. What a cool guy. And very talented too. Also the camera team are simply awesome. As are the sound team too for that matter. […]
