Thorn Productions presents – Elindil’s Secret

Well, we are finally into the Blue Screen portion of the production schedule. It consists of 4 weekends which commenced on Saturday 20th October and will conclude on Sunday 18th November with the Melbourne Cup weekend in the middle as a rest weekend. Unlike the location shooting, there will only be two posts covering this period of the production schedule, this one and then one after the last shoot day in November.

The 1st weekend was a challenge, anything and everything that could go wrong did go wrong. In essence it was a logistical failure. With that said, there was still a huge amount of footage shot which was apparent since we ran out of room on the disk drives. Looks like we need to purchase another 4 500GB drives.

During the week we called a special Production Meeting with the executive crew plus several actors. The agenda for this meeting was to discuss the issues with the 1st Blue Screen weekend and hash out a modified plan.

The 2nd weekend ran 100% smoother, I’m sure we will all know what we are doing with this Blue Screen shoot by the time we get to the final weekend. There are several changes that we made that assisted in this. Possibly the most significant ones are;

1. To setup the area on Friday evenings, leaving only the Blue Screen and lights to be done 1st thing on Saturday morning.
2. Alter the order of shooting to minimise setups.
3. Appointing Andy Strempel as 2nd AD (Assistant Director).
4. Define an absolute end time for each shoot day, this may need some minor tweaking.

For most of the cast and crew, the last scheduled location shoot was another early morning start. Today was all about capturing the final footage at “the old mans” cabin, located near Healsville and then “Allan Scott’s estate”, located in Kilsyth. There are several pickup shoots that will see some cast and crew revisit some of the locations, however for most the remaining travel is all local.

Commencing next week we move into the final stage of the production phase of the project. Shooting all the Blue Screen scenes. At the start of the project we had intended to build two sets, however two weeks before shooting started we reassessed and decided to shoot blue screen. This decision has directly resulted in just over half the film requiring some type of effects.

We would also like to acknowledge Lorraine and Tony (left and centre) for allowing us to user their home as the backdrop for Allan Scott’s estate.

The filming at Trentham was always going to be one of those locations that would be special for all involved. Firstly the location is a fantastic backdrop for filming and secondly thanks to Spectrum Camera Cranes we had the opportunity to capture footage that would have only been a dream. So thanks Graeme for helping support this project in this way, you can see several pictures of the crane below.

There is now only one more shoot day before we go into the Blue Screen shoots. While this is disappointing from the perspective of not travelling to more amazing natural places within Victoria. It is exciting to know that we have just under half the footage for the film. In saying that, there are several pickups that will see us return to some of those locations as well as one that we deferred due to higher than average snow falls.

See maxfactormama’s blog for a summary of the day.

A few images of the crane