schedule

Delays but Possible Progress

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The week before last, we managed three days of shooting, and I was feeling optimistic about squeezing in another four. Ha! That was wishful thinking. I spent most of last week faffing about with schedules. Every time I thought I had it sorted, it unravelled again. Such is the nature of filming. Actors’ work is notoriously erratic, so they take jobs whenever they can. When you have as many actors as we do, it’s a juggling act to get them, the locations and the crew all lined up at the same time.

It finally dawned on me that I wasn’t going to get everything wrapped by the end of September as I’d hoped. I’ve resigned myself to having more shoot days and probably having to tweak some scenes along the way. As it stands, we’ve two more shoot days in offices lined up in September and one in October.

Another concern was the weather. I’d arranged a truck and some locations near Stansted airport, but getting everyone there was proving difficult. So, I started scouting closer to home and found a truck supplier in Sussex. I went to see the trucks and a few locations on Friday, and they look promising. In fact, the backdrop of the South Downs works well with the narrative. Serendipity strikes again. Over the weekend, I messaged the relevant cast and crew. It looks like we’ve got enough bodies to cover most of the scenes, and if we have to tack on an extra day, that’s just a hit we’ll have to take. I’ll be doing a few final checks on Monday, but things are looking good for the truck shoots next Friday.

One other thing – I finally set up a Reddit account and started posting. Not that I understand how Reddit actually works, but I guess any publicity is better than none.

Screen Flicker & Gaming

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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.

Script Lock and Scheduling

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It was a hectic week last week, but it feels like I achieved very little. I brought in an “agent” up in Essex who’s been doing some location scouting and managed to get some shots of our truck, so the truck sequences are shaping up quite nicely.

Angela did some more work on wardrobe, and I tidied up the script, finally getting a locked version out to the actors on Friday so they can start learning their lines. However, I’ve come to realise something about actors that hadn’t occurred to me before. They don’t just learn all their lines in one go. They actually need to know when each scene is being shot so they can focus on learning the relevant bits. Bleeding obvious really. Because of that, setting some shooting dates has become the top priority.

This is proving trickier than I expected. First, I need to compile the availability for actors, crew and locations. I’d already started pulling this together into a spreadsheet, but with 18 actors, at least five crew and around six extras, figuring out which scenes can shoot on which dates is a somewhat daunting task. Then I remembered we’ve got scenes involving Zoom calls or video sequences, and somehow these need to be sorted before the main filming. There are loads of dependencies and, to be honest, it’s a bit daunting.

So, in 2025, what do we do when something feels daunting? We hand it over to AI, of course. With ChatGPT’s help, I’ve written some code that should be able to work out the first available date when the necessary actors, crew and location are all free for specific scenes. It’s also becoming clear that most of the complicated video stuff is all happening on one shoot day, so I’m going to start with the easier bits.

I’m still collecting availability info and there’s plenty of other stuff to think about – like props – but I’m hoping that this week we can lock in some shoot dates, which should help focus everyone’s attention.