Hanging Around

Last night's post held over this morning, due to poster fatigue; hanging around is surprisingly tiring. Instead I'm going to do a small post, and another on Tuesday.




I was originally going to open with: 6pm on Saturday night; we’ve just finished for the day after8 ½ hours on set.


But it's now 9.40 am on Sunday morning, and I've got half an hour before leaving for the today's filming (which I hope is the last day). Fatigue caught up with me last night...so instead of a post last night and another today, I' doing a short post today and another on Tuesday (tomorrow I have a nine-hour day at uni plus travel time, which is not conducive to blogging).


As you have deduced, we got our permissions on Friday. However, the lead actor had a lecture which he couldn't get out of, so we started later than planned on Friday afternoon. The SU team were -as always- incredibly helpful, and having started two hours late, we managed to finish only an hour behind schedule.


Saturday was another story. Started late (the other male lead was late this time) and just got later.

Filming is an incredibly time-consuming and at time time-wasting process. Perhaps film crews get used to being at the mercy of the public, stopping to allow through traffic, smart-alec pedestrians who ‘know their rights’ and delivery vans – lots and lots of delivery vans...or maybe if you're the BBC or Miramax, you just hurl a wodge of money as compensation to all affected, and have the street closed off.

So if you think you’ll need two hours, allow four. Get ready to do it over and over again --one five sentence exchange required thirteen takes, partly because of Joe Public, partly because it was getting toward lunchtime and energy levels really do drop, meaning that people make more mistakes.

Either way, we wasted an awful lot of time, and for those not involved in the shoot, it can actually be more tiring than those doing the filming and acting. Partly because we have to keep focused for when we are needed, or to keep an eye on the bags.

As producer I combined overall responsibility with guarding the bags, keeping hold of the shot list and interveing in the film-making as little as possible. There were times when I felt a second explanation to the actors about how they needed to approach a scene helped, but I did try to minimize it. It's not particularly sexy, but just as every film needs spear carriers, so every crew needs runners. Only time will tell whether it was the right approach....