As the weekend sunshine warmed our ambling fellow citizens we were in a damp cellar underneath a pub in Hove. The reason was the Sci Fi London 48 Film Challenge. That Saturday morning, along with 500+ other teams across the country, we received our unique brief for the challenge. As of 11:30am we had 48 hours to write, shoot and edit a short film called ‘Natural Work’. Luckily Producer Fearghas
7am on a Saturday morning and a guerrilla strike on a drizzle-glazed shopping square for a meet cute between our two leads. This meant more strawberry milk for some and biscuits for others, such are the requirements of the script. Thankfully the early start and the ‘will it/won’t it/oh it just did’ rain meant the opportunity for us and the general public to disrupt each other was fair minimal. Aside
It’s a few weeks after the fact, but the third day of shooting on Fleur-de-lis not only went fantastically well but it also marked the longest I have ever spent in a florist (I normally know exactly what I want, you see). Cast and crew convened at the shop early enough to be able to see their breath in the October sunshine. Thanks to a very kind and generous shop
‘A plan is just a list of things that don’t happen’ [1] – Parker You can’t film paper. Well you can, that’s animation. But you can’t film a shot list, or a floor plan or a sketch of how you thought the set would look like. Well you can, but it’d make a dull film. Well it might not be dull, in which case I’d most definitely watch that film
Allied with my earlier post on not creating a world for your film, only enough of a world to be filmed (Duckmaking), producing the short film has also made me think about my scriptwriting, and careless writing. It is easy to forget that what you write into a script has the potential to become, and if you’re lucky will be, an instruction for people to realise that part of the