Kodak Awards - Progress Update - Window (Cancelled Shoot)

Yesterday we were scheduled to shoot 'Window' in Sunderland, at 6PM. I have had a busy few days, this morning I travelled back to Glasgow to the uni so I could load the film into the camera for tonights shoot. I was incredibly nervous in doing so, this is the first time I will have loaded the film into the camera. As I am director on the other advert 'Time' it was not my duty to load the film. Despite my nervousness I recalled all that I had been taught over the past few weeks and applied that knowledge. Luckily I had recorded a tech demo from one of our lecturers on my phone, so when I was loading the film I was able to look back on that. 

Loading the film itself is obviously very tricky first time around as you can't see a thing you're doing with your hands inside the bag. It took me the good part of half an hour to find my way around the mag which was inside the bag and to successfully load the film. Once I had loaded it, we were ready to go. The crew had loaded the equipment into the car ready to drive to the set where the actors were already waiting. Then a bit of a problem occurred. 

We realised we had loaded the wrong film. Whilst I am partly responsible for this (if I'd checked which film I was loading, I would have maybe realised) at the same time we would have had to cancel shoot anyway. Long story short the wrong film stock was handed to us, the wrong one had been removed from the fridge a few hours prior and the right one had been left in. The film stock I had loaded was the 250D stock used to shoot in daylight settings. This stock was to be used on the 'Time' advert I was directing. The right stock to load would have been the 500T stock used to shoot in low light situations. Despite loading the wrong film we couldn't shoot anyway as we didn't have time to remove the 500T stock from the fridge and wait a few hours. 

Needless to say the director and producer of the advert were very frustrated, they had organised this whole shoot only to cancel. There is nothing we could have done on the day however, so for them it was back to planning another shoot at another date. For me there was a valuable lesson in this, to always check your film stock before loading. Another positive I took from it was that my film stock was successfully loaded. The 250D stock is to be used on Monday for a shoot. This basically meant I didn't have to worry when it came to Monday, the stock was loaded into the camera and ready to go!