Screencraft

Pre-production week 1: After solidifying our roles, mine being casting director and 1st AD, we jumped straight into pre-production with a series of online meetings throughout the week. Namely a ‘writers room’ was set up just to bounce ideas and come up with an initial concept, Jack is going to take all of this and start drawing up a comprehensive story. My main role this week has been around supporting Jack and communicating agendas between the director, rest of the crew and also DMP.

I have also been doing some research on the role of 1st AD as I have never had experience in this role. I mainly used the database and information on ‘ScreenSkills’ to gather a good understanding of the roles and responsibilities of an AD, I have realised that on a set with a larger number of crew and a lot of footage to shoot, the role of AD is crucial in the running and completion of principal photography. I have also been taking notes from a variety of YouTube videos and from some interviews with talented AD’s, for example, particularly insightful was an interview with Anya Adams (youtube.com/watch?v=ZJhwSxODYHI(opens in a new tab))

Pre-production week 2: As the script starts to come together, I started to give some real thought towards casting and what I am going to be looking for in actors. We had to collectively work on a presentation this week to show our lecturers, for this presentation I drew up some succinct character bios for each of the protagonists and noted down a few insights into specific skills and actor would need to pull off these characters. It was great to collaborate on this presentation with the other departments as it gave a better picture of what this film and all of it’s components might look like when we finally get to production. One particular challenge that became apparent this week was a lack of synergy between our course and the DMP course, some of our crew were reluctant to get them involved as to not confuse the process but I believed it was incredibly important to get them up to speed and try work alongside DMP as closely as possible. The EPK, social media and BTS are crucial to our production process and so I took it upon myself to reach out and set up a meeting where we briefed them on everything that has been done so far, there was also the opportunity to discuss posters, marketing and to get their input and opinion. This meeting was between the producer of DMP, myself and one of our producers, the producer of DMP then relayed this information to everyone. I found this to be effective and I’m glad I decided to take control, I think it opened up lines of communication between the two courses and allowed for more collaboration.

Pre-production week 3: This week I had a great opportunity to develop my knowledge of the casting process in the week before sending out the casting call and running auditions with a guest lecture from Hannah Williams who has over 10 years experience in casting. I got to ask lots of question and took 3 pages of notes, I found the experience hugely beneficial and as a result I feel much more comfortable about hosting the auditions for this film. Towards the end of this week I started to create the casting call which includes key information about the production, character bios and a short, enticing treatment of the film, this week I also asked the crew to put the information of any actors they know of and who might fit the roles into a google document on our drive. I am planning on sending out a general casting call on a public platform but I will also individually contact the individuals on the google document, this means I have plenty of contacts to reach out to and will hopefully have quite a few people auditioning for the roles. The Easter holidays are fast approaching and I would really like to have casted it by the first week, this way I can sign off my role as casting director and focus on being a good AD as we approach producution.

Pre-production week 4: I sent out the casting calls earlier this week by emailing the actors on the google document but also through the Facebook group ‘Actors & filmmakers in Cornwall/Devon’ which garnered a good response. I have been busy editing the most recent draft of the script and putting into sections for each specific character audition. This way, the actor auditioning gets the most time to shine and, for example, there are many parts of the script where Lemur doesn’t have many lines so I stitched that character’s scenes together for the audition. Organising the audition timetable has been more challenging than expected, due to a number of responses from applicants and also because of the online nature of the auditions. I settled with creating a google meet in which the different actors auditioning would join during their time slot, I left time in between the audition for myself, the director and producer to deliberate and share notes before the next applicant. The auditions were spread over 5 hours in total. I thought that the auditions went very smoothly, better than expected for my first time auditioning people. I would start with introductions and then engage in a conversation about their background and experience, we would then start the script read-through, afterwards we would discuss their interpretation of the character and/or ask them to read again, perhaps for a different character. I tried to keep the atmosphere quite relaxed as I felt this most effective for getting to know someone when you have just 15 minutes over a google meet, I felt very happy with the process and coming to a decision about casting afterwards was very simple as we all agreed. Asking the actors to read a different character when the one they just auditioned for didn’t feel right was a very fruitful decision in the end as when Adam auditioned for ‘Chimp’ it wasn’t what we were looking for but he ended up being the perfect fit for ‘Ape’.

Build week: I have to admit, the beginning of build week was exciting but also daunting. When faced with 4 blank walls and most of the crew saying they were no longer able to come in and help due to other deadlines, I was slightly concerned. Day 1 was a bit slow as we tried to visualise exactly what we wanted before spending the budget on materials, not having our production designer on set that first day was certainly a challenge but between the rest of us we were able to realise the look of the production. We started by purchasing some wood wallpaper and then cutting and sticking it to cardboard planks to give the illusion of wood panels, this was hugely time consuming and expensive so we had to come up with an alternative solution. Because the set was supposed to look very run down, I suggested the idea that the walls could be water damaged and so we could cover the walls with alternate material to reflect this i.e tarpaulin. Over the course of the week there were many times where we had to solve problems on the spot, I realised there was quite a lot of indecisiveness holding us back and so at times I stepped into be a final decider, not because I thought I was right but just because a decision needed to be made to progress. I think this will be better next week when every department is on-set to make decisions. Build week was not perfect but overall we were happy to achieve so much in a week with so little people helping to build. Another issue we encountered was that we had to let go one of our actors due to unforeseen circumstances, as casting director this was going to be my job to find a replacement but as I was busy in my new and equally as important role as AD, the producers took care of this while I offered some advice and guidance.

Test Shoot: The realisation of the bank holiday only the week before meant we got off to a slow start due to missing the first day of shoot week, however, spirits were high. I spent most of the day coming up with the schedule for the week so the producers could draw up call sheets, I took my time to comb through the shooting script so I could guess how long each scene would take as accurately as possible. To do this I had to take into account every department, e.g makeup, sound and any special effects. It was also more challenging as one of our actors had new limited availability some mornings, this proved to be only a small obstacle though as I was able to schedule his scenes in the afternoon and organised someone else to body double for him when necessary and so it did not impact filming at all in the end.

Shoot: The shoot started slow but it was expected, we found it difficult to find a rhythm initially, but thankfully I had scheduled more time for the first day as I expected this to be the case after coronavirus isolation and limited collaboration over the last 4 months or so. It became apparent that we would not have a Clapper on-set and so I took on that role also as I thought it complimented my duties and responsibilities anyway. Our camera operator didn’t show up the first morning and so a lot of pressure and strain was put on our cinematographer, as a result I made sure he had adequate breaks between scenes. Adding to the list of challenges on the first day, the scenes we covered in the morning were shot without a card in the camera, likely due to all the pressure on the cinematographer, and so all that footage was lost. I kept everything as calm as possible as to not upset the atmosphere, we didn’t even inform most of the crew and actors until I had quietly reorganised to shoot those scenes and so it didn’t feel like a big problem in the moment. I quickly realised that remaining calm and collected as an AD who is organising the day to day running of the shoot is essential, a change in my mood could affect the actors or crew and throw off the momentum so whenever a problem came to be I would try and deal with it as relaxed and as positively as possible. This is definitely something I will take into the future as an AD or anyone on-set really. I also learnt to be prepared for anything as you never know where or how a new problem may arise, for example, we had problems with smoke possibly setting off the alarms and so I ended up being in charge of getting them temporarily turned off in between scenes, a job I had not expected but quickly had to take on.

After the first day, the shoot went pretty smoothly up until the final day where I think stress and exhaustion was starting to get to everyone. Again, I tried to keep everyone calm and happy but I think this was less effective on this day. I found problems communicating with the director and as a result I felt I couldn’t do my job as effectively as I wanted to, which I believe also led to a break down in the schedule and so added stress as everyone rushed to finish filming. On reflection, I’m not sure how much more I could have done on the day to prevent this as I felt like everything I said to the director was dismissed or ignored. Perhaps, earlier in the day I should have taken him aside and talked this through as I don’t think it was something that could have been dealt with on-set. In the future, I will be aware of how tensions can vastly affect the progress of a shoot and will ensure that any difficulties are dealt with as quickly as possible outside of the professional environment, however, I do believe I did my absolute best to do my job that day.

Thanks to DMP BTS team (Jack, Greta & Sinead) for supplying on-set footage for my sketchbook film.