Blog: Making Movies

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I spent most of yesterday in London town with Mr J Dredge making a MOVIE! It was precisely as GLAMOROUS as you might expect.

Things got off to a bit of a rocky start the night before when, approx. 18 hours before we were due to start filming, I found out that we had lost our cameraman. I immediately LEAPT into action, digging out my old camcorder which promptyly BROKE, leading to about an hour of frantic googling to try and fix the, apparently notorious, "Error C:32:11". It turned out I COULDN'T fix it, so was forced to fall back on that old piece of folk wisdom: "Throw money at the problem".

It just so happens that I live 6 minutes away from one of the largest shopping centres in Europe so, after a further hour of RESEARCH I strolled over and, after a bit of wandering about, managed to buy myself a new digital camcorder. Throwing money at problems, it does tend to work! It'll also probably end up being rather handy, as it means I can now film OTHER stuff. Call me crazy, but I think this whole "internet" and "video" thing could well be big in the future.

Next morning I arrived at our location laden down with props and tripod and camera and general STUFF, and found John arriving at precisely the same time, similarly laden. I'd managed to book a room at my old Alma Mater, City University, through the LOVELY people at the Alumni Office so, after quite an ADVENTURE through darkened corridors and Other People's Offices, we found ourselves in the meeting room we'd asked for. Cristina from the Alumni Office was there to meet us, and we thanked her for doing such a GRATE job - the film was set IN an office building, so this was perfect!

Cristina left us to it and we commenced two hours of FILMING. It all went surprisingly smoothly - it's only a very short film but it has several locations, some with quite complicated set ups, but through a combination of pre-organisation and John being A Proper Actor we managed to MOTOR THROUGH until just after noon when we found ourselves doing the final shots outside. These were the most difficult to do as PEOPLE kept wandering past. It was noticeable that nobody batted an eyelid about what we were up to tho - this was LONDON, where everyone Pointedly Ignores anything even vaguely unusual!

We packed up and went up the road for some a) LUNCH b) SCHEMING. We'd written this film so we could enter the Reed Short Film Competition but we've got an idea to make a whole SERIES of them. Lunch was thus soundtracked by excitable CHAT about how we are going to conquer THE UNIVERSE through the medium of online sketches, and also some rather ODD (for me) ideas about casting. I'm not IN this film at all, which usually would bother me as (SPOILERS) I do tend to want to be THE CENTRE OF ATTENTION, but for this I found I was quite happy NOT to me. This is either MATURITY or me realising that I am NOT a Proper Actor, but either way we agreed that we'd look into using some of John's other Proper Actor friends to fill in parts, with me maybe doing HITCHCOCK-ESQUE small parts!

When I got home afterwards I was quite excited about all the possibilities ahead of us, and also a bit worried in case it hadn't actually worked. The camera had run out of battery - FIVE SECONDS after we'd done the final shot, weirdly - so I was a bit AFEARED in case nothing had been recorded, but it was all there and so I spent the evening going BOGGLY EYED doing a first edit. I sent it to John, received NOTES, and am now working on the NEXT version. We don't need to have it all done until mid January but I'm hoping to get it online well before then - i shall CERTAINLY let you know when it is!

posted 19/12/2014 by MJ Hibbett

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I can't see the Internet catching on.
posted 19/12/2014 by John Dredge

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