So as some of you may or may not know recently been involved in shooting a short film as part of a sort of Job Centre initiative thing.
So I initially started in the Art Department. Since we were sort of the property of the JCP we weren't allowed to help with the joinery work of building a set in case like say one of us sawed off a hand or something, it tends to look a bit bad. Art Department started a few days before the main shoot since it's hard to film on a set if the set isn't constructed. First day was being set across Newcastle looking for potential props and room dressing so I have like 120 photos on my phone atm for all that stuff. (I managed to pick out the "perfect" wallpaper). Then spent wallpapering the set, painting other bits etc. I also constructed some blinds n curtains too. I'll maybe make an imgur album or something.
Director turned up on the ...Saturday iirc. He was super approachable (in fact in general everyone was quite nice and only person I had an issue with over the event was another trainee and I'm to gather not the only one he rubbed wrong way). In fact one of the lasses dad turned up to pick her up n Director pops out n brings him in on the set to show what we're working on n the film n such.
Come Monday, when the rest of the trainees started, a couple didn't turn up including one for "DIT", or "digital image technician", so I ended up taking on that role since it seemed up my street. At first I'd hoped to straddle both roles but the way DIT worked it wasn't hugely possible apart from the Monday where there was no shooting going on.
So a DIT, since it's not in the above article and was also a totally new role to me, at least in name, if not in a "well duh it makes sense this person exists". So films these days are mostly shot on digital which means fancy pants SD cards and image files to deal with. The DIT role is to take these cards once a shoot is done and "offload" them across to (in our case) 3 back up drives, give everything a visual check to make sure there's no issues with the footage. We picked up on some strobing (turned out a software issue on our end), the edge of set on some shots (already cleared, it's white wall so fixing in post), and a bit of the camera rig in a window reflection (not an issue cos that scene is cropped to 4:3). Also sort out colour correction (in our case a lot of the images are originally kind of washed out cos of how the image data is stored, and easily brought to normal colours), and occasionally doing some further tweaks for the director to get an idea of the finished shot will be like (in our case tweaking the whites/highlights on a scene set in purgatory). And once we also get the sound, the fun task of syncing up the clapper board audio with the clapper board visual. Not always possible if they forget to do it.
Then at the end of the day distributing the back up drives to relevant people to make sure they're spending the night a good distance apart from each other. Loads of other technical things too, but I'm still processing (and researching) some of those terms myself.
Oh yeah, producing "dailies" too to be sent off to like the producer, director, director of photography, and a bunch of other people too. We used this really fancy piece of kit called iMovie for doing that (basically just to downgrade it to 720p for most of them to watch off an iPad).
Then on the Friday I got to be an extra (all trainees were since it helped flesh out a night club scene and there was 15 trainees). Not the greatest experience but I think most of us were like "goddamit we all signed up for roles behind the camera for a reason". I'm also tall so I got shunted around in shots a lot too to help flesh things out. Main beef i think we all had was this same sort of techno loop played pre-shooting to get us all synced to a beat for our weird dancing which was a horrible earworm. Because I was on set rather than in the production office for much of this it means while I've seen much of the short film already I've not seen myself on screen (though we're all wearing the same hoodies and back to camera so not sure I'd be able to tell anyway).
Then all done went out to the pub for a wrap party drinks session.
Big thing now is following up on this. I think there's a bunch of BBC n CBBC shows that shoot up here which seem to be the go to for work in the area. Recently finished a totally new CV specific to film (since I basically have to remove all my previous work, and stick in film credits so the format is completely different). Been super fun week n half, kinda having a slight slip n slide after the fact but I'm sure that'll pick up. Kinda between a rock n a hard place though cos Job centre kinda like to push you towards office and retail work, traditional jobs. Today was a bit of a surprise to see Ubisoft postings since there's normally never creative listings.
Imgur Album:
http://imgur.com/a/0ktt9
Another thing about doing a shoot is you also learn about shooting block busters in your city centre...months after the fact
We're a stand-in for London. Though probably making London look better than it is given they're racing down what's considered to be one of the best streets in UK. (It is a really nice street)
