Still no website? Ah well… A good day, shot another interior scene and got to use more lights and gels. Pretty lights and gels. Rooms heat up really quickly under the lights we’re using, so once a take is done, its usually a mad scramble out of the room in an attempt to breathe some air thats not filled with hideous ammounts of sweat.

We then broke for a bit and took off to Cambridge to shoot a road scene. And I had quite a bit of fun on that one as you’ll see here.

Tomorrow we get a day off. It’ll be my birthday and I’ll be doing absolutely nothing! Awesome.

Looks out window… snif… still no website.

But shot a hospital corridor scene at… (drum roll)… the University of Waikato! Dressed up the English department to look like a hospital corridor with extras and pot plants. Hopefully it’ll look like a hospital corridor to others, to me, looking at the footage, it looks like the University of Waikato’s English department, but to the uneducated eye, it may look different.

But got two more dialogue heavy scenes off. Still about a weeks shoot left to go. Hooray and aww for the end.

Hopefully tomorrows blog will actually be on a website. Else this post is just going to nowhere… how strange would that be?

The internet hates me and I have a bad tendency of forgetting to pay my internet space bill. But filming chugs along as usual and I write this post knowing it wont be seen til at least another day or twos time.

It’s like I’m talking to the future!

Anyway, tonight the show reel is finally approved and posted to youtube. Viewable either here or just…

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.

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…

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.