Film production: To Wales

I should be packing by now, but a short note here before I am off. All is prepared for my trip to Wales, well all that I could think of that should be prepared.

There are a couple of changes to the original plans:

The school children will not be there. The school has withdrawn from the project because they were in involved in too many other things so they did not have the time anyway. This makes my life as producer a whole lot easier. In stead of school children we will use some more actors. It is not completely the same, but with some creative camera work, I am sure it will be fine.

The weather for the filming days looks ok. A bit of rain on Tuesday, and dry on both Wednesday and Thursday. The weather tomorrow however looks bad. I will get to Cardiff by train in the afternoon, but the camera crew will take the car from London in the late evening, and it seems like snow is on its way then. It is rather crucial they make it to Cardiff, if they don’t all will be cancelled and moved to another date.

All actors are booked, we will work with about 10 different young actors. (Not all at the same time though!) Did I mention that one of those actors had a minor part in Love Actually? How odd and cool and encouraging (for me that is) is that? Others have been in the Bill, Skins, Casualty and Dr. Who. So they are experienced, more experienced than I am, so I do my very best to not fuck it up.

The insurance issues are sorted. Apart from my companies liability insurance, we also needed an extra equipment insurance to cover for the rental of the lights we need.

And we needed to write a risk assessment too. It’s basically a long piece of paper stating what risks are involved during filming for the people involved, and how we intend to manage those risks. My boss wrote it, it’s one of those pieces of paper that make you want to give up the whole thing. It’s tedious and boring and time consuming to write. But we had to.

It has been a very hectic week with constant phone calls, texts and emails. This week will tell me if I have prepared well enough for everything. Whatever happens, I have learned so much. And if I have forgotten something I am sure it can be fixed/solved while we are there. There are some experienced people around to help me.
We have cameras, we have actors and we have a script.

I think it’s time for some “Action” now.

(I’ll be twittering along the way)