So that's the movie title. I regarded it as a draft title but we never changed it. A lot of interesting shit happened after the last post I made and it might have been good to document it as it happened but too much was happening and I didn't have time.

Let see now. This will look like I'm ripping into one person here. But I'm actually withholding a bit. There is no nice way to say some things some times.

We set up a shoot one Friday evening for one scene, the actors came but it started getting cold and dark rather quickly. We were shooting scene 3 or 4, whatever... which took place in a commercial garden. The location was Parnell gardens. I had produced a storyboard, slightly scribbly but had shot planned out. But we didn't use it. Apparently the script called for the two characters to be sitting while my storyboard had them walking down a garden path. But hang on... didn't I write the script? Later I asked Jackie and Roslyn if they thought that if the characters were walking or sitting. Walking. Okay...

Anyway we shot stuff, I wont go into it further, then we went home. Saturday no shooting, Joyce has some thing on Saturdays. Sunday, our lead male, Daniel canceled on us saying he was sick. wtf. We decided to continue shooting as much as we could without him, shot a park scene and then back to Joyces house for the interior shots. We didn't really follow a storyboard either, Joyce just shot stuff. It started to become disorganised. Our actress suggested a replacement if we needed a more reliable actor and we discussed it and Joyce suggested we talk about it on Facebook that night.

However before any of us were home, Joyce fired Daniel. We were going to have a meeting on the Tuesday and it was a struggle to get the footage off Joyce before then but myself and Jackie managed to on the Monday night. I reviewed it and was pretty annoyed. It was all terrible. There was 2 shots that looked okay in the park scene. Everything else was badly framed and had wide depth of field. There was crew in some shots marked as good.

I went in on the Tuesday morning with a rough edit of once scene and said how hard it was to get it working because of the continuity. Said that we needed to basically reshoot everything and this time be organised and use the storyboard. Joyce's response was to become slightly withdrawn an not give input. When questioned she said she needed to prove a point. We mucked around for about an hour and a half while Joyce was snarky then she went home. Jackie said she agreed with me and didn't care for Joyce's response much. Anyway what followed was the most productive day we'd ever had. Roslyn was more active and the three of us devised a schedule for the following weekend and drew up a storyboard that we all had input on. The difference was huge and that kind of cemented a few feelings on the subject of where Joyce had lead us amongst the group.

The next day I intended to create a detailed shot list and with that plan timings of the schedule in more detail and then hopefully work on Studio for once. But instead the day got stressful. Jackie was quite upset because she was having real problems getting all the actors to be able to come on the same day, then Joyce sent a text message to Jackie withdrawing her equipment that we needed. We couldn't get AUT equipment for the following weekend, it was all booked out. At this point I said there is no way Joyce is to remain director. Jackie organised a small meeting with our tutor and we told him of our dramas. He said to writer her a formal letter relieving her of her position, sign it the group, cc him in and get the filming done. So I wrote a letter, Jackie approved it and sent it. We got a predicable barrage back, but Joyce didn't want to come to the new shoot. We had organised a new location at Jackie's house (which was a far better location anyway). and organised the actors. We had somehow managed to get 2 good cameras and I created a very detailed shot list and shooting schedule. Joyce had decided on the Friday that she wanted to come to the Saturday shoot. We'd actually reached a point where we didn't her around screwing things up but couldn't say that. Oh yeah I was director now. I met one of our actors in town and accompanied her to Jackie's home and once everyone was there we started shooting. I pushed things along so we didn't run behind time. This was hard. And we did run behind time. We were driven to the local botanical gardens to shoot the the park and garden scenes. We had to delete the beach scene. We got back to Jackie's house to shoot the final home scenes and it was starting to get a little dark and we were losing light. It was getting stressful as things started to become undone near the end with so little light (it was actually still day but I discovered just how sensitive to light cameras are). We wrapped up shooting and everyone went home. The next day I went back to Jackie's house and we filmed an establishing shot in the park that we had managed to miss doing and the opening scene that her and I had planned from the start. We made a Dolly up for the scene and photographs for the backdrop. Joyce now had a role as editor but I made an edit too just in case.

The following Tuesday we had to meet with the tutor to show what we had. I wasn't terribly impressed with the edit either and Jackie bought up my edit (she knew about it) and so we viewed that and tried to plan the best bits of each version. The following Thursday Joyce decided she didn't want to edit anymore because she "had done so much" and myself and Jackie probably needed to do more. WTF.

So what followed was myself, Jackie and Roslyn coming in on Friday, Saturday and Sunday to edit the thing. I also colour corrected, a job that Joyce said she'd do but we neither trusted that she could or would. So I did that too. Much of her editing didn't make it in either. She was now to do the sound which was my job originally. We had to screen this film on the Tuesday. Long story short it was completed at about 4am Tuesday morning and we screened it. While other groups said how much fun they had aside from technical difficulties, Jackie pipped up and said "we didn't really have any technical difficulties, we had group difficulties". After the screening, people from digital design came up to us and said they knew what the problem was. Why didn't they warn us at the beginning? We had to write peer assessments. Jackie got an excellent from me, Roslyn a very good and Joyce a poor. Her comments section was a mini essay detailing almost every way that she derailed the our work.

How did the film look? It wound up comparing quite well against the others. Yet we could have done it much better. Myself, Jackie and Roslyn made a really good team...

This goes to full HD if you fullscreen it.