Soul Searcher: November 24th 2003

Last night we picked up the Doodies scenes which we dropped a couple of weeks back due to our sound recordist pulling out. Bill Dempster, a boom op from London town, came up to help us out and worked alongside Kyle, a student from the local sound college, to record the audio for the night. This was not helped by the mixer which James got them. A portable SQN? Nope, a full size mixing desk, mains powered. It was also not helped by my extremely complex shots. “Right, Bill, in this next shot I’m tracking from this end of the cafe to the other, they’re all speaking and we don’t have any radio mics. Okay – rolling to record…”

We all expected it to be one of those wrapping-as-the-sky-grows-light nights, especially since we had to pick up Kat’s close-ups from the previous day at Doodies, due to H. Lehmann Ltd. (Stoke-on-Trent) being dumb asses. Actually we wrapped at a fairly reasonable 3:30am. My favourite scene of the whole movie was shot last night – Joe teaching Heather to play air guitar. We set the camera up on a dolly outside the cafe window and shot three takes of them letting rip with the silly faces and strenuous hand motions.

Edd’s trying to get to sleep across the room. He stirs: “Don’t forget the cup of tea, leaving your producer to lug heavy objects up the stairs by himself…. If you say I’m whining I’m going to smack you in the face.” The event to which he is dozily referring is last night’s wrap when I pissed off to the actors’ house to pick up my washing, leaving him to cart my armchairs (which had been used in the Doodies scenes) back up the stairs to my flat whilst I enjoyed a cup of tea with Ray. My defense is that such director/lead bonding opportunities subtly enhancing performance and the working relationship on set. But of course that’s bollocks. Probably.

After three hours’ sleep the crew got up to shoot Van Beuren’s introductory scene at TGS Bowling. It was pretty straightforward and we finished just after 1pm. It’s now 3:10pm and in half an hour we’re going back there to shoot a nighttime exterior before moving on to Campions for another short scene.

Soul Searcher: November 24th 2003