Filming got under way this past weekend for Sacrificial Wolf the first of Craig Robinson’s two films for OVFM’s entries to the 2012 North vs South competition.
Craig took the role of director and cameraman while sound was handled by Chris Coulson, Sylvia Snipp and Tony Relph (my chauffeur and father), Bob Wyeth handled continuity and yours truly did the clapping! Andy Watson was also on hand, taking some “behind the scenes” footage and pictures whilst helping out when needed. There were just two cast members, Vanessa Chapman as Stephanie and her unwitting partner Neil Aplin who thought he was just taking his missus out for a drive and ended up playing the contact.
Shooting took place at Jeskyns Forestry Park which is tucked away down Gravesend way, a vast expanse of fields, trees and dusty pathways favoured by dog walkers, many of whom would stop and stare at us at work while their dogs would sneak under the gate of the “No Dogs Allowed” compound we were shooting in!
It was a productive day and we seemed to get quite a lot done despite the distraction and the changing weather. Craig has provided these screencaps from his editor to give us an idea of the fruits of us labours (click on image for larger sized version):
And here are a few pictures courtesy of “Raw” Bob Wyeth, including the four leaf clover he found (and subsequently trod on!):
More pictures to come so please check back soon!
Well done Craig and all of the Crew – Mike Coad will be so happy to have OVFM N v S entries this year – have never seen an actual four-leaf clover Bob, good omen I hope, even if you did tread on it!
Post-Prod update: After a slightly delayed start, I finally managed to ingest nearly 6gb of video (I’d missed a few files from my earlier estimate) and nearly 1.5gb of sound files. I produced a rough-cut today (a very rough cut), which at present looks like a badly shot home movie.
This is to be expected however, as it has been put together with only the first good (i.e. not fluffed, not interrupted by a dog bark or overfly etc.) take of every shot, using only the camera’s own guide sound, straight cuts, no colour correct etc. etc. The idea at this stage is purely to make sure that everything is present to tell the story – not to produce a good quality end-result. That will come later as each separate take is evaluated.
As a result of the rough cut, we now have a good estimate that the final film will be about 5½ minutes. We will need to go back and do some re-shoot, but only with a bare-minimum crew (in fact maybe only the camera, and rely on wild-sound) as we are not missing lines, but some decent link-shots. Some of the shots at present are far too jump-cut in appearance.
This can be a problem of a single-day shoot, as multi-day you can evaluate video over night and take up the slack in the next day.
In the next week or so, I’ll also be arranging the second shoot with Vanessa so that we can get the opening and closing scenes out of the way (both very short), and with Neil for his telephone voice-over.
Hi all – I thought that I’d better post something here seeing as I’ve now had to miss two clubs meetings without any update.
Unfortunately, I very much doubt that I’ll be able to get this done for the NvS. While the main part of the filming has been taken to rough-cut, there is still an introductory section to film and things are conspiring to ensure that I make no progress in /anything/ right now, filming or otherwise.
I had to intermit my MA (costing me another £1k for another year of tuition) because of issues with the transfer of our department down to Maidstone but still, one week away from the start of the new academic intake not only have we not been able to install about a dozen servers on the new infrastructure, we don’t even have an infrastructure. To say that we are ‘unhappy’ is perhaps an understatement.
Add this to unexpected commercial development work that has reared it’s head, plus the fact that I’m 3 weeks into a very severe ear infection which is still screwing up my balance and hearing, and it’s clear that having the time or the capabilities to successfully edit video is out of the question.
I’ll get the damn thing finished this calendar year hopefully, only I very much doubt it will be in time for the competition.
Thanks for the update Craig. Hope you get better soon!
Sorry to hear about your problems Craig.. Maybe things will smooth out in time…
Sorry to hear of your problems Craig (would make a joke about ‘ear but not in good taste!) I hope that Maidstone works out for you, technology is wonderful but can be such a problem. Hope to see you again soon.