Saturday was quite possibly one of the most exhausting, exhilarating and nerve-wracking experiences of my life. For the first time ever I directed someone and captured them on camera!

I have dreamt about this day ever since I saw a ‘making of Star Wars’ programme back in 197-something, and thought, ‘cool, I want to do that’.

Twenty five years later, I got there.

And here she is in all her glory, quite possibly the only surviving photo(!) of the Mistress of the Marsh… All respect to Amber for making Vickie look fantastic, and Vickie for making Gertrude better than I ever imagined. The footage came out nicely, but I’m a bit spoilt for choice on what to do with it – I want to mess it up a bit, but I’ve found three of four ways of doing that I like… Think I’ll wait until the rest of it is shot and then see what works best.

We also shot the news report that Jess and Alice watch on the TV. No direction required for this one, Chris just let rip with a tirade of humourous ad-libbing. Will Ferrell’s got nothing on the dry northern wit of this guy…

It’s taken me three days to get this post up because I’ve been fighting a really annoying piece of spyware. I thought I was going to have to reload the whole damn thing, but thanks to Microsoft’s new Spyware remover, AdAware and some common sense, I finally beat the bugger into submission. Never thought I’d be so grateful to Bill Gates, but he was certainly being toasted this evening!

On top of that, my son and my wife have spent the last two nights awake with nasty sick bugs. Must… sleep… now…

Went out onto the Romney Marsh at lunchtime scouting round for locations for a couple of scenes in the short. Found a perfect site near Aldington, then realised that Paul O’Grady could see us from his house there, so I might look elsewhere, so as not to upset anyone.

The two scenes I want to shoot this weekend are the news reporter footage that Alice watches when she turns the TV on and the last scene with the Mistress of the Marsh (Gertrude Stumpe as I lovingly call her). It’s more second unit type stuff.

Spent a couple of hours researching 18th century make up, to better understand what Gertrude would have looked like. Basically (as was my hunch) she’s gonna be very pale skinned (so we need to get the footage in the can this weekend if we can before Vickie sets off next weekend to Turkey next weekend for a week and comes back all tanned!). We also need to make Vickie look older for this part so I need more pointers on ageing make-up techniques.

Apparently 17th and 18th century ladies believed that washing in your own urine was good for the skin. Samuel Pepys’ wife tried puppy peepee, though he never reports whether the experiment was a success.

Went round to Darren and Amber’s this evening to plan for these shots and fell into a big discussion about the final scene where the Mistress of the Marsh appears in Jess vision (or is it a vision!?). We came up with some really good ideas.

I want the Gertrude scene to be quite scary. I watched The Ring again last night and analysed it, getting more than a few ideas. I love the way the girl moves when she crawls out of the telly. It looks like they just got her to walk forward slowly and then cut out the middle bit just after she starts moving and before she stops, so she slowly accelerates into the jump forwards. I’m gonna try a few experiments with Vickie, getting to walk backwards and forwards to get an unnatural flow to her walk.

The other day Scott Watson asked me what lighting we were using. The best I can say at the moment is they are Dedolights, low voltage ones, but still very bright. Chris the Gaffer brought a kit from some place in London. I’ll ask him about it at the weekend and publish a full list of equipment we have at our disposal.

Thanks to the power of DV Rack and some hard lessons learnt on Saturday, yesterdays results were much, much improved and a lot of the problems sorted out.

Chris’ lights are a godsend, along with the superb microphone. Instant semi-pro results without even trying. With a bit of thought and diligence, we’re achieving results far beyond my expectations.

Only problem now is that I have to make sure I concentrate on directing properly, not trying to play sound man and cinematographer and tea boy all at the same time. It’s a shame Nic could be here yesterday, but I can tell her the things she needs to catch up on quite quickly (mainly refinements to using DV Rack), perhaps later this week.

Now I just have to get to grips with editing! Mr Coughlan meet Mr Avid.

Our first rehearsal day went extremely well yesterday. Talk about a steep learning curve though…

Still, several unknown questions were answered to my satisfaction, proving that I am either a) a natural director, or (more likely) b) a spawny get.

Vickie proved she was more than a capable actress, Nic proved that she has a good cinematographic eye and Chris the gaffer proved that he can light a scene and make it look very professional.

Bloody marvellous!

Even my wife surprised me with hitherto unknown acting abilities, standing in as she did for Dr Crabtree.

There are still areas of improvement we need to work on though; focus seemed to be an issue, especially on wide shots, though we didn’t really get stuck into the full functionailty of DV Rack, so I hope that will cure those problems once we use it properly.

We also need to get into the mindset of shooting, whereby, if you’re in a scene and you have the lights set up, make sure you don’t move on to the next setup before you’ve finished with the current one. Quite a few times we set up, did a couple of takes, moved, then realised later we’d have to go back to a previous setup.

We’re off over to Louise and Chris’s a bit later to see what it looks like on their home cinema setup. Then hopefully more work on improving our results.

Chris and Louise came round last night with details of the lighting rig they’ve just brought. Rather sexy it is too. Shame I don’t have any money left to buy anything else with!

No news yet from the lady at the book shop, she said she’d read the script over the weekend and get back to us. I do hope she says we can shoot there – the place is perfect. I also spoke to the manager of my Mother-in-Law’s shop as they have some rather large safes which could double as Mr Widdershin’s back room and he was more than amenable. This might be useful if the lady at the book shop has reservations.

It also struck me that if the lady in the book shop didn’t want us to film there, we could use Mother-In-Law’s shop for the whole bookshop scene. It would require some dressing, but might add to the fact that it’s not a normal bookshop, a strange, specialist bookshop. Hmmm…

We now have our flat! We went to scout it out this evening, it’s perfect, even down to the old computer in the corner of the living room. And as the two girls who live there work in a bookshop, it’s full of books everywhere, which only adds to the effect.

One of the girls also works in the pub nearby (a Shepherd Neame one – great!) so I’m wondering whether to shoot some optional extra footage of a pensive Alice waiting for her shift to finish… Not sure, might be worth shooting even if we never use it.

Louise and I are off to the bookshop (which is literally just below the flat) tomorrow afternoon.

Also had another stroke of luck on the equipment locating front. The web development agency we use at work used to be into video and have some old equipment lying about, including a rather nice Sennheiser Mic, which they have let me borrow for the shoot. Fabulous.

Chris isn’t having so much fun trying to get lights. He’s decided he wants to buy some, but cannot find anyone to sell him some. Loads of places will rent them out, but few want to sell. Very strange…

Met up with Louise and Chris to discuss equipment and budgets this evening.

Chris has been very much for getting a HDV camera, such as the Sony Z1, which I would dearly love to have. But we realised that the funding we have secured so far leaves us with a dilemma. Either we go for the Z1 and skimp on the audio and lighting budget, or stick with our old Canon XM1 but light it and record it as good as we can.

Having spent money on DV Rack to ensure we can get the best possible results from the XM1, I’m pushing for the latter, in the hope that if we make it sound as good as we can and light it properly, we should get away with slightly inferior quality video.

Thankfully, my stateside buddy, Bill Smith, having spent a weekend hanging out on the set of Kris Kristofferson’s new movie, with the great man himself and his friend, William Sanderson, managed to get a lot of information about the indie film circuit and film festivals. Apparently we don’t need to worry about transferring to film for most film festivals now, which leaves us with the option of shooting with the XM1 in frame mode if we want, which should make for slightly better images as well.

I also went through my thoughts and ideas for Alice with Louise. Louise thought they were the best character notes she’s ever received, which was good (thanks Judith!).

I panicked slightly when I realised that time was slipping by and it’s only two weeks until our technical rehearsal weekend, and I still haven’t worked out a shooting schedule yet. Best get my arse in gear…

A strange thing occurred today. As you may have seen in previous posts I mentioned a local actor, Ken Colley, who I was thinking would be good for the part of Mr Widdershins. Since then I hadn’t seen him around town at all.

As Vickie and I were walking back from our lunch meeting at the Globe, having spent the hour discussing SToA in great detail, there was Ken walking towards us, right outside where we work, and where I intend to shoot one of the scenes he’s in (the one in the car). I had the screenplay in my hand!

I just smiled and said, “Afternoon,” thinking that this probably wasn’t the best time to approach him, with the waft of Spitfire on my breath and the need to get back to work for a phone conference. At least I know he’s still about, though whether he’d be interested in helping out remains a mystery…

In the last week we’ve gone from the idea that we’ll be making nothing more than a lowly no-budget DV movie to now talking about shooting and editing completelyi in HiDef. There are some risks with this strategy, but it makes sense to future proof ourselves as quickly as possible. If the funding comes through for a HiDef camera, which is look very promising at the moment, we should be on a roll. However, this’ll mean the need to beef up my PC for editing, but that shouldn’t cost too much. Couple of hundred quid tops I hope.

Meanwhile, I’ve now completed my script notes, although there’s plenty more to add still, I’ve enough to start talking to the actors we’ve got lined up already to prepare them. I’m meeting up with Vickie (Jess) this lunchtime to go through the script with her.

We’ve also secured a location for Jess and Alice’s flat, which is a huge relief as I was starting to anic a bit that we wouldn’t find any. It almost sounds too good to be true, a flat in Hythe (exactly where we wanted it to be local to the male actors we have in mind), currently ocupied by two women (so no set dressing) who aren’t about much at the weekends. Fabulous! We’ll be going in next week hopefully for a scout. I’m praying it’s OK, although I think it’s the best we’rre going to get so we might just have to work around an potential problems.

If anyone wants to support the project, please either contact me (andy@firecracker.co.uk) or click the donate button!

* Ahhh! Pop Will Eat Itself – those were the days! My first ever proper gig, aged fifteen. And I spent the whole night bouncing around next to Miles and the Bass Thing from the Wonderstuff. Fantastic!