Video Diary #6: First Location Shoot

On the 23rd September 2007, we found ourselves in Bristol Boxing Gym filming a few of the scenes from the movie. Not only was it our first ever location shoot, but it was Darren's first ever time directing. Talk about in at the deep end! Fortunately we had lots of support from our friends!

Set Dressing

So, we have all the equipment, we've knocked up some props and we've done our casting. Now we just need to find somewhere to record our movie. A lot of the action takes place within the confines of an office. Nice as it would be to film on location in a real office, the costs involved are phenomenal. So we have to make our own!

I'd like to introduce you to... Jon's bedroom. It has all the standard features of a bedroom - a bed, a chest of drawers, curtains, even a treadmill.

Jon very generously allowed us to decimate this room and turn it into our set. He will be spending the coming weeks sleeping rough in his spare room!

The first job is to strip the room of all of it's traditional bedroom acoutrements. Now the purple walls (a girl assures me that it's lilac - I don't know how to tell - it just looks purple to me) aren't really appropriate to an office setting, so that has to go!

We actually managed to con one of our cast members, Susan, into helping out - in fact she probably worked harder than anyone getting the nasty cheap B&Q paint on the walls. It took 3 coats and a whole day!

Eventually, the paint was on and our next job was to furnish the room.
Details such as replacing the light fitting with a flourescent strip light will help maintain the illusion that we're not just filming in someone's bedroom!

A few budget desks and cupboards and a salvaged filing cabinet later, we had a room that was really starting to look like an office.

Finally, it was time to dress the set like a proper office - a pinboard covered in notices - monitors and keyboards on desks, stationery, files, reference books and other bits and bobs finished it off nicely. I think you'll agree that the finished product looks pretty good! Note details such as the health and safety poster behind the lamp and the canteen menu on the pinboard. We're all quite proud of ourselves!

Box Clever

So, one of the key scenes in the movie takes place in a boxing gym. It's not a boxing movie, but that's where the scene takes place. This is primarily motivated by Stead's love of boxing; the scene could easily have taken a very different form, but one of the perks of being a producer and scriptwriter on you own movie project is that you can do... er... pretty much whaterver you want.

Anyway, the scene works really well on paper, but a convincing boxing ring isn't something that can be knocked up easily so, as with a number of other locations in the movie, we needed to find a real life boxing gym that's happy for us to take them over for a day or two.

A bit of searching around on the net narrowed it down to a couple of local gyms and a couple of e-mails later, Stead's elicited an agreement from one of them to accommodate us. Although we've yet to meet the owner - hopefully that'll happen later this week - he's indicated that he's happy to help and that it's something he's done before. I'll post an update and hopefully a few pictures of the place once we've had the meeting!

Next up... find some office space...