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.