ICELAND SHORT FILM PROJECT
(PRODUCTION DAYS)
Today was going to be another busy day for me. I woke up early to do the usual equipment checks and hand them out to the outdated crew. After around half an hour of sorting the equipment out I proceeded to have a little down time to reflect on my journey so far. Today was another important day for me as I had been asked by my lectures if I would participate in their film shoot, I agreed to and had to get all the equipment back from the outdated crew, check it all over and have it back in the mini van by 4:00pm ready to go on the next shoot. The time had come and everything went according to plan. The film had an 8 man crew and we arrived at our location around 5:00pm. Our lecturer gave us a quick pep talk on professionalism and then we went on to the shoot. The location was an old house situated by the city which had been loaned to the crew by a couple of media students from Iceland. The first thing I did when we arrived was get all the equipment out of the van, then I got it into the house and started to set everything that was needed up. After I dealt with storing all the equipment in an efficient manner my main role was a runner. Throughout the shoot I was setting up , fetching and being generally where ever I was needed. The shoot lasted 3 hours and was quite tight but according to the first AD (Steve Dawkins) We got everything we needed. Now I was responsible for getting all the equipment packed away and back in the van in an efficient manner. This took me around 30 minutes all in all and then we were whisked back off to the hotel.
When looking back on this day I think the main thing I learned was that if you want to make a film and don’t want any problems it’s all about the level of efficiency. I can safly say that this was one of the most professional shoots I’ve ever been on. I say this because I could see how much work all the lectures had put in with there, shooting schedules, call sheets, equipment lists and assembling their crew. I have taken on board all this on board and will be asserting what I have learned on my own future film shoots. I think over all the whole shoot went well and I’m looking forward to second day of shooting which commences tomorrow morning at 8:00am.
Thomas Barnes 