Last week was stressful. The week before that, I’d hoped to get some filming scheduled – but I didn’t – so last week became the “right, let’s definitely get something in the diary” week. That was the plan, but as ever, the spectre of technology raised its ugly head.

Several scenes involve Zoom calls, and I had a grim realisation: people are supposed to be looking at screens in those scenes, so I probably need something actually on the screen. Realism and all that! Imagine a scene with four people having a conversation over Zoom. How exactly do I shoot that? Ideally, I’d have a film crew at each location, with two cameras per actor – one on their face and one on the screen.

HELLO! This is a micro-budget film. Worse still, there are five of these screen-heavy scenes. Five! Then, just as I was absorbing that, I remembered something else: filming screens is a technical nightmare. Flickering, refresh rates and other stuff to ruin my day. I spoke to the camera guys who explained things like shutter angle, frames per second and mains electricity frequencies. Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, I remembered the computer game sequence and realised there’d be similar issues with this.

By Wednesday, my brain was ready to explode. Originally, I’d planned to shoot the office scenes first “to break the back of it”, as they say. That idea was abandoned swiftly in favour of shooting some outdoor scenes. I reasoned that if I could at least get those scheduled, the actors can prepare while I work out the screen-based technical issues. Even that turned out to be more difficult than expected, but by Friday, I’d managed to send out some scheduling emails for three scenes.

To my relief, after sending out a couple of those, I calmed down a bit, and it dawned on me that maybe some of the scenes weren’t going to be quite as challenging as I’d feared.

We’re not out of the woods yet, but I can see a way ahead. This Monday, I’m off to the main office location to run some tests with screens and cameras. If that goes well, I’ll feel more confident locking in the office scenes. I’ve also spoken to some gamers, including a guy on Fiverr, and I’m hoping the game sequences can be handled without too much hassle after all. Fingers crossed!

Watch this space.