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.
One week to go!!!!!!!