FLM235 Week 9–10 Blog

Week nine saw the filming for Grimdustries across 6 days and it was an intense and exhausting week. As my first attempt as 2nd Assistant Director, it was an interesting and educational experience but there was a hell-of-a-lot of work to be done. The first shot day filmed majority of the final scene of the series and this day did not start well, with the camera transporter forgetting the batteries and putting the shoot day 2 hours behind. But it was this day that the crew learnt how to be productive as well as adaptive which allowed us to claw back our late start and still finish early, this is a testament to the first assistant director Samanthe for getting the crew on track, although the monday shoot was a horror story for continuity. We then filmed from wednesday through till sunday and Iwas on set each day. The filming days usually ran quite smoothly with only minor setbacks each day. Each day’s call sheets were written by me to make sure that all the cast and crew knew what time to arrive on set. Although the shoots ran smoothly and most days we finished way ahead of schedule, there were still miss steps and incidents which was my job to write up to notify the producers and in turn the lecturers.
Thursday was my time to shine as 1st Assistant Director as Samanthe couldn’t come in, and oh what a different beast this is. I spent all of the night before (well as much night as I got because I got lost on the way home from set and got home at about 11:30) preparing for my big boy role on set but even that didn’t prepare me for how much stuff is going on at once that I needed to be on top of. My thursday shoot got off to a late start as we were waiting for cast and crew to arrive, and from there more and more problems plagued my shoot. We had difficulties with making the location work to the way we intended and also with how we were going to shoot around the fact that one of the days actors hadn’t arrived. All this added up to my shoot running over time by 45 minutes, the only shot day to run overtime for the week.
The rest of the shoot ran pretty smoothly except for a small kerfuffle on friday’s shoot which came down to poor planning from the management part of the crew. The shoot was only supposed to take an hour as it was a straightforward quick couple of filler shots which myself and the other management underestimated and forgot to plan as thoroughly as the bigger shoot days. Luckily I came onto set and was able to straighten it out without too many people being upset at us.
It was a hell of an experience working on the Grimdustries set and i learned heaps in my time as an assistant director, I can’t wait to see how the footage turns out.