Progress Update - Kodak Awards Shoot 2

Today's shoot was the caveman and cavewoman sequence of our 16mm project. This shoot involved the same subject as the Victorian shoot we had on Monday, which was a man failing in all of his efforts to impress a woman, the recurring theme throughout the advert. As I discussed in my previous posts, the costumes we acquired contributed greatly to this shoot actually going ahead. A few days ago I was very worried about this shoot because I always saw it as the most ambitious and therefore the hardest to pull off. The entire shoot was based around two fur coats that we needed to cut up and somehow make into suitable costumes to fit a caveman and cavewoman. With a lot of thanks to fellow students and my flatmate (again discussed in my previous post) we pulled it off. We started around nine this morning, picking equipment up then driving to Seaham beach where we were meeting actors at 10 o'clock. We were all on time thankfully, and had time to experiment and figure out a way to make the costumes fit the actor and actress. This took us a good part of an hour. Fortunately there was a small cafe by the beach that allowed us to use the toilets of to get changed. 

Come 12 o'clock we were set up and ready to shoot. All credit to our actor and actress today who braved the cold amidst takes. We were shooting on a beach away from December with characters in extremely revealing costumes. We did our duty of keeping our actors warm between takes by providing them with blankets etc. The shoot only lasted 2 hours so the cold wasn't such a big issue, if we had been shooting for longer it would have been a potential health and safety concern. Speaking of which, the tide began rapidly approaching us by around 2 o'clock so we were constantly having to hurry up with this on our minds. We didn't want our equipment ruined by the sea and we most certainly didn't want to drown in an attempt to wrap up the shoot. 

Overall today was a huge success. With each shoot I feel like we are overcoming the steep learning curve of shooting on film. As our technical knowledge advances, as does our set etiquette with each shoot. I now feel as a director my relationship with actors and crew gets better and better with each experience of filmmaking.