Sunday, July 30, 2006

Sunday off, Monday work

Today was somewhat of a day off from filmmaking. It was very relaxing with church, a barbecue, and blackberry picking. At this point that plan is that we will start shooting this Thursday.

Even so tomorrow starts a big day. All the lead actors arrive on the train tonight and rehearsals start in the morning. I am off to London (about 1h15mins from here) on the 7:55am train. Nick Wise (the Director of Photography) and I will be going to Joe Dunton & Company Limited at Elstree Film Studios where they have been kind enough to let us spend the day testing the camera with a full assortment of lenses to see what will work best for us to shoot RHD.

Should be an exciting day except for hauling a 45lb computer to London and back.

Weather'­s nice. A few sprinkles but cool (~78F) and low humidity.

As they say in France, "Robyn misses me."

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Publicity!

Appeared in the Chippenham News:

In England

I arrived in England last night. What a relief to arrive with the $20K dollars worth of equipment (a $4,500 computer and a $15K movie camera) all safe and intact. The movie camera was not difficult to transport, here is a picture of the movie camera we are using.Yes, it really is that small. It is an SI-1920HDVR manufactured by Silicon Imaging. This photo is without all the additional paraphernalia that will eventually be connected to the camera, like a lens for example. I will post photos later with the camera all loaded up.

The computer, on the other hand, weighs 45lbs and is your typical tower PC. It has 2 TeraBytes of hard disk storage (that's 2,000 GigaBytes). That should hold about 15 hours of shooting. I had to check the computer, of course, and it was gut wrenching to drop it off with the baggage agent and walk away hoping to see it again on the other side of the Atlantic.

Good job United.

Let's make a movie

For those of you who do not know already, I am off on a summer adventure to help Mark Kalbskopf make a movie... a real-live, honest-to-goodness, feature-film, coming-to-a-theater-near-you movie. Now you might be thinking, "Tim, you don'’t know the first thing about making a movie." ” And I would have to respond with "“You'’re right. I write software and about all I do with movies is watch them." Still here I am helping my friend realize a dream.

I will be "on location"” near Chippenham, England assisting Mark with some of the technical aspects of shooting a romantic comedy about a young man coming of age while dealing with the culture clashes between the English and the Americans, and those with faith and those with no-faith. He will be shooting the film in a completely digital format (that is where I fit in so more to follow).

I will also take on the self appointed role of unofficial chronicler during the 3 weeks I am here. My intention is to record my observations about the whole process of what is happening on the shoot. I expect my blog entries will fall into two major categories: technical and personal. In the technical case I will be talking about the technical/logistic side of filmmaking. Inevitably this will be from a naive point-of-view since, as I mentioned above, I have never done this before. For my personal observations I might comment on any thing from differences in British and American cultures to my opinions about the business of shooting movies, or maybe the ever-popular dirt on the actors and actresses <smile/>.

One of the best things about this blog will be fact that it ends after 17 August (when I return home) so it's a pretty short commitment! Anyway if you are interested in following along I intend on updating this blog daily, so check back every now and then.

Lights... camera... action!