mike[space] dot net

This weekend was the first part of the shoot for Out Of Office, the webseries that I wrote and am co-producing. We are using my friend John's flat for the set, and he very helpfully volunteered to go away this weekend, so we had the place to ourselves to sort everything out. On Friday, the crew descended to start dressing the set; blacking out the windows, rigging the lights, moving the minimal set around and and working out the practicalities of filming. Unfortunately, Tom's armchair had not fitted into Beth's car, so we decided to head back to mine to see if we could fit mine instead. In spite of our best efforts (parked semi-legally and being drizzled on), this was a no go. So minus the armchair, we were fairly confident that we'd be able to start shooting pretty early on Saturday morning, and decided to call it a night. I headed home to an empty flat, as Claire was off to visit Vicky for the weekend (happy birthday Vicky, sorry I couldn't be there!), and settled down to a big plate of pasta and Bladerunner: The Final Cut (awesome btw).

Saturday morning, and the earliest start I've seen for a while left me bleary eyed and confused as I stumbled around the flat, trying to remember if I had any clean clothes to wear, and despairing of the state that the flat had descended into. Matt had managed to get hold of a car, and it was bigger than a matchbox, so we were able to get the chair in this time. As we began to set up, it became clear that we still had problems with glare on the posters we'd put up on the wall. What followed was a ridiculous amount of cardboard based engineering as we tried to work out angles at which we could hang them to avoid the lights, whilst at the same time still look like they were attached to the wall normally. In the end, we wound up where we had started, with the posters fixed directly to the wall, and we managed to work out a new lighting configuration to deal with glare.

Then came working out the first shot. Because of cast availability, we are shooting completely out of chronological order, starting with episode 5. On top of this, we were actually starting in the middle of the episode, involving some fairly complex blocking on a set that we had not yet worked with. So in the end, we actually started shooting about an hour and half later than originally planned ...

I've been on a couple of sets in the past, but this is the first time that I have been fully involved in the creative side of the project - in the past I've either been an extra or a spare pair of hands. It was great to watch my material coming to life, the cast seemed to be having fun playing with it, and it was great to have little conversations here and there to decide the direction we wanted to take with particular lines or set pieces. It was also a little sick-making, particularly with the first shot of the day generating so much discussion. At one point I was standing there wondering if my writing had caused more problems than it had solved, but actually it only took minor tweaks to resolve the issues. Discussing particular lines with the actors was great; a really satisfying experience.

All in all, I think the shoot went really well. I just spoke with Matt (the director) and the plan is that we will get together on Wednesday to do some editing. So by the end of the week, we should have a rough cut of the first episode together. Which will be awesome.

Big thank you to everyone involved so far, it's been awesome, and will hopefully be even more so in the longer shoot next week!