Video Diary #7: Breakdown

On Sunday, we completed the last of the filming on our Office set. We had lots of individual shots to pick up in order to finish off scenes or bridge parts of scenes together and most of our cast descended on the set. Special thanks goes to Glenis, who was suffering horribly from what she claimed was a heavy cold, but seemed to closely resemble SARS - yet she struggled in valiantly for us!

Once we'd finished the office scenes, we had to break down the set and turn it from an office into a meeting room, so that we could film an additional scene that we felt we needed. More on that in a moment. First though, here's the video:



More on that exposition. As Jon mentioned at the end of the video, we realised fairly late on that, although we knew exactly what our characters motivations were and why they were doing what they were doing, the script didn't really lay it out clearly for the viewer. We decided that the best way to do this was to write in a short scene where we simply laid our cards on the table and said 'this is why we're all here'. As the film is set in an office it seemed obvious that they way to do this was in a briefing. So we set up a teleconference (which meant we didn't need to cast any new characters - just find some voices at a later date. Lazy? Yeah, probably. But it does the job and gave us the opportunity to add some visual comedy and a little characterisation).

The new scene will probably only last about a minute on screen, but will hopefully make things a lot clearer to the audience!

A brief note on props: It turns out that even second hand teleconferencing units and flip chart boards are really expensive. We got around this by 'acquiring' them from our day job (several members of the office facilties guys were in on the conspiracy). We brought them back again the next day. Honest.

Also... you can't remove permanent marker from a whiteboard surface with turps. We found that out the hard (and slightly panicky) way. Fortunately Dr Karen was on hand with nail varnish remover - it's the acetone, you know! Always handy to have a chemist around the house.

Video Diary #1: Script Readthrough - first draft

The plan was to read through the script with a reasonably impartial third party obvserving. This would allow us to pick up on any problems with the structure of the script, any problems with clunky dialogue and so-on.

The idea of recording the readthrough was so that it could then act as a tool when we worked on revising it - just to make it easier to listen to the dialogue and so-on.

We haven't included any of the actual script in this clip - at this stage it's top secret and if you were to discover any details of the plot, we would have to kill you!

Readthrough

Jon and I had our first complete readthrough of the first draft this afternoon.

It was a very useful exercise which allowed us to identify some of the more obvious problems with the script - things like the passage of time and so-on.

We videoed the proceedings and will be posting a short video diary in the next couple of days. Watch this space!

First Draft Complete. Yay!

It’s taken about 6 weeks, but finally a first draft of the script is complete. It’s currently coming in at a whopping 81 pages which is a fair bit longer than I’d expected. If one is to believe the theory that one page equates to one minute of screen time, then we’re running 21 minutes over the expected running time of 60 minutes.

Stead and I will be getting together at the weekend for a read through to get an idea of how it’s actually clocking in and whether it’s all hanging together ok. Then we’ll be starting a ruthless editorial process during which the majority of the script will undoubtedly be rewritten and Stead and I will attempt to kill each other over ‘creative differences’*

*for ‘creative’ read ‘ego’ and for ‘differences’ read ‘mania’.

The Script

So the script for this project is still in it's infancy. We know the gist of it. Where it starts and where it goes and even one or two things that happen along the way. Putting all of this down on paper is the first thing to be done. Once that's complete we can start looking at all sorts of other logistical things - locations, casting, props and so on.

A bit of research courtesy of my good friend Mr Google uncovered this handy little guide to screenplay formatting!

I've done about 10 pages. Quite a few to go...