Blog Post 5 — Pre Production

For me, I didn’t really notice where the line between the scripting and the pre-production was. It all seemed to blur together in preparation for shooting.

As the DOP, my focus wasn’t on the location and talent release forms or tracking down Sassie to organise when we could film with him. I was more concerned on how I was going to shoot it. Having filmed quite a few weddings before, I had and idea of what it’s like filming party sequences — but at the same time I knew that a nightclub is nothing like a wedding venue.

From writing the script with the director, I knew we needed very sudden contrasts with the shots I was getting. We needed loud crazy intense shots of Sassie being his wild self at a nightclub, only to cut to a very quiet, partially hungover Sassie back at the Internet Cafe.

We’d spoken as a group about how we would have to behave on the nights we were filming, and decided that we would have to make sure that we added to the atmosphere, rather than take away from it. The last thing we would want is for people to feel weird because a quite obviously sober film crew just showed up to film everybody. We needed everyone to be super comfortable with being themselves and partying just as hard in front of a camera.

As a group we all worked very well together. We were all quite flexible with giving of our time and our talents to put into this documentary. It was actually quite a surprise to me with just how easy it was to coordinate dates, transport and a place to crash after filming. I feel like we all entered production feeling prepared and equipped.

-Beau.