Very productive day today. Shot off about two hours of footage and got off five scenes in one day today. We even had a decent turn out of extras to fill out a classroom.

As intended in an earlier post, here are some more pretty stills.

And hopefully by tomorrow, the showreel will be approved for digital distribution. Hooray.

Quick post as computer decided to suddenly throw a hissy fit at me and totally freeze, thus losing all my blogger work and images I was screen grabbing for this post.

So instead, I’m going to go finally see the Prestige and be able to say “damn, that was a great film y’all!”

Oh, didn’t do a day 16 post yesterday as I simply came home, tried to do some fine cutting/onlining of the showreel, but instead collapsed in an exhausted heap and slept all night and morning. But we had a relatively short day today and boldy shot a one shot scene, which will hopefully go well when put together, but who knows. Anyway, the showreel is almost fully finished, with edits and colours awaiting full approval before I can upload it and/or mail off DVD copies to the lucky few of you.

Right, off to the movies I go. Been a long time since I’ve actually been to one.

Have just finished an all nighter, cutting together a showreel for our media day today. Currently being burnt to DVD, lets hope it doesn’t somehow magically catch on fire. Hopefully the showreel is decent enough, I’ve not had enough time to fine cut some of the edits and even less time to properly go through colour correction. Here’s hoping its not going to be too bad for the press.

Right. Several more copies to make, a bajillion coffees (and some) and I’m off to shoot.

Good day. Good confusing day for everyone involved. Can’t divulge details, but lets just say, it was the most amusingly confusing day for many today.

Also shot a scene set in a hospital. And I think there was a bit too much of an influence from watching Green Wing recently. I think there were more silly takes of this deranged Asian doctor running around in the background, doing silly dances and waving a shotgun around the place, than there were of actual proper takes. Hopefully, some good stuff for the bloopers.

Anyway, because we were so efficiently confusingly quick today. Tomorrow is a day off and rather than being another Dead Chris Day, it’s an Editing Chris Day! Because Monday, we’re scheduled to have a ‘media day’, so I’ve taken on the task of cutting the footage together into a showreel to show the press.

Can I do it in one day? With a hangover? Only time will tell…

Woke up this morning with absolutely nothing to do. No filming. No work. Nothing. Just me, bored. Coffee, Green Wing and a lot of nothing much else.

So been trying to keep the energy levels up for tomorrow. More crowd coverage to prepare for and a little mischief on top of that. Stole some footage from Director Ben this afternoon and have been picking out certain shots and setups that I still like as screen caps.

Unfortunately, quite a bit of them are a tad plot spoilers, while others, though pretty, work better as moving shots as opposed to static stills, so I’ve had to restrain myself a bit in picking images, but here are some of the best of the rest of what I hove shot thats quite, quite satisfying. Some have been subjected to a little photoshop, just to enhance certain colours that didn’t initally come through, but overall, I’m quite happy with these in terms of composition and lighting and pretty.

I think my eyes are watering again and I need some rest. So here are pretty images. Let me know what you think, there’s still an arseload more that want to be uploaded and beg to be uploaded, but the powers of effort and criticism still hold them back.

Short day today. Had only one scene to shoot, cause an actor for the other planned scene went off to the Big Day Out. No grudges or anything, actually quite glad for the little break. Even better, tomorrow is a day off and shall be spent mostly editing and hopefully some drinking. Bring on Dead Chris Day number 2!

Good day. Exterior morning, interior afternoon. Once again, the happy gods of filming weather smile down on us and we were blessed with fandangly overcast weather and the interiors were most favourable towards flouro lighting and stuff. Shots looked like they were from a digital Michael Mann film or something.

Also, got bored and did this video in our down time…

The monkey holding the piece of paper is supposed to be holding up a sign that says “Chris Tan, Director of Photography” as a cheap subtitling gimick. The second piece was supposed to say “Pictures of You, Coming Soon”… but the damn exposure on that camera… tsk tsk…

And at the less-than-zero Pictures of You film website there are links to the photos that are supposed to be up on the less-than-zero website, but are instead hosted on a completely seperate server. But the photos that are recently up now are some stills taken from a hastily put together showreel we played back on Sunday you can view here. Unfortunately, the images are in the wrong aspect ratio, but at least for the most of them, being raw footage, they look pretty good.

Here are a couple of my favourites of the bunch, scaled properly and not color corrected in anyway. There are a lot more that I liked that haven’t been screen capped yet, but hopefully will soon… real soon.

Good day.

Reshot a scene from yesterday we had to abandon due to sound issues and losing light and just blitzed through it this time. Weather was absolutely perfect this morning to have that overcast winter look. And while we had that light, we shot at another location down the road for another scene. Shot another in the middle of town with lots of nice coverage. Shot another scene in a bar on the other end of town. And then shot one more setup for an earlier scene, because an actress was unavailable at the time we were there… but did we match the lighting? You betcha.

But with all these external shoots going on, next time I look at someones script, it’s gonna be counted up the ratio of interior to exterior shoots… actually, I just realised that interiors can drive me insane figuring out how to light… to hell with it. Next script, one room, two people, talking heads the whole film.

This is just a hast post as my computer which has been suffering a few upgrades recently, has decided to spit something out and not start up again. Very annoying as I want to get somemore editing done after today’s shoot.

Good start in the morning. Everything, actors, camera work and so on where all good and ready to go. Every blocked and rehearsed shot went without a hitch… Except for the bloody weather that had us standing around half the time, staring at the sun, wondering whether ‘that next cloud’ is going to actually go over or not. I swear, there was this one cloud that actually stopped and reversed backwards, just to piss us off.

Afternoon and finally, we’re eating something not bloody sandwiches for lunch… pasta! Stuffed, full and onto more filming, which being in a public place, got regularly interrupted by public foot traffic, ambient noises, children, cars backfiring, airplanes, helicopters, speedboats and rowers.

Now, I love the whole indie, low budget approach to filmmaking. It’s just more fun that way. But sometimes, like today, I really would like to be on one with a much bigger, more anti-anything-that-can-concievabley-come-in-and-screw-up-this-production budget.

Great weather today. Gets a happy lighting director’s score of zero. Shooting an exterior for winter, during the summer. Waiting for overcast clouds to diffuse out the sun and get this really nice cold look on screen, instead we had to force ourselves to shoot it more stark and with the hard shadows that stupid Mr Sunbeam makes.

Also got burnt some more, sweated like a pony, started getting dizzy, drank water till I felt like puking and all around felt like crap. But we’re hopeful we got some nice shots. Unfortunately, not enough people turned up as extras today, so it’ll be interesting to see how few fit that all in.

Afterwards we eventually stumbled our waywards home to writer Scott’s house. Drank. And eventually started making silly little short films just to entertain ourselves. Will upload tomorrow. Just realising that there won’t be any space for them here yet.

In other interesting stuff, Harlan Ellison does a reading of a short story here and under Prince Myshkin and does a helluva reading indeed.