Twenty-seven days into 2019 and I've just done my second film shoot of the year. Two weeks to the day since helping Marcos out on his Foxbite music video, we filmed a Christmas video - only a month after the season's end. To be fair, we started planning it out over Spoons food towards the end of November, but the unavailability of actors left us without any way of completing the film before Christmas.
So we rescheduled. There's no way the actors will still be busy at the end of January, we thought, because Panto season will be over. The truth is that Panto season was very much not over. And in fact all of the actors we had in mind were very much not available on our filming day (the one exception being Naomi, a girl playing the imaginatively-named role of Daughter in what I'm told is her screen debut, and whose availability we had scheduled around). Fortunately, the Internet exists. We put casting calls out on Mandy and StarNow, and reached out to a couple of local Amateur Dramatics societies. There weren't many responses, but we were able to cobble together a cast.
Marcos and I arrived at the location - his grandfather's house out in Kingsthorne - an hour before the actors, so that we could set up the Christmas decorations (my nan's tree and baubles, and his mum's fairy lights). It was a good job we arranged to arrive early. The house turned out to be a nightmare to find, and so I found myself wandering the country lanes so the actors would be able to see me as they approached.
As always with a new cast - especially one composed mainly of non-actors - there's a bit of a stilted start. Everybody's just getting going and easing into things. Naomi (fortunately for us) had good chemistry with Nick and Pamela, the actors playing her mum and dad - but she started out a little uneasy. The nature of the shoot meant that we were able to tease her out of her shell fairly promptly, by having the actors play a game of Uno during the first scene of the day. This turned into a game at every Christmas meal, and they all seemed to take to it well.
One issue we had been aware of ahead of the shoot was the difficulties in scheduling it within the day. The structure of the film meant that we had three locations, each of which was going to be shown in four almost-identical scenes over different years. We chose to film location-by-location, sparing us the need to light each scene over and over again - and as a consequence there were constant breaks for costume changes. The cast were all more than happy to do their part, though, and as a result we got some nice-looking footage.
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| Myself and Marcos on set (photo courtesy of Carrie Pratley) |
