A good four months after the pilot, we gathered for a marathon four day shoot on the webseries. Again, this was fraught with difficulties and losing people ahead of the filming. Crew changes and the loss of a key guest actor lead to some last minute changes but I think out of the ashes came some really positive developments. None of us had worked with Jill McAusland who plays LouLou before and she was a revelation. The other decision that paid off was Ana Torre as Mrs Benson Phillips – a very small role – but she helped us on crew and we got a couple of lovely bonus moments including a song (you’ll hear that in 2017!). The big excitement for us as comedy fans was of course Ewen MacIntosh who plays a character called Splish. Ewen is most famous for playing Keith in The Office, probably the superlative comedy of the last few decades. He was very friendly, down to earth and very patient. A thoroughly nice chap to have on set to boot. We had torrential rain all day which made exterior shooting nigh on impossible and lost our cameraman. We ploughed on and dragged my housemate in for a few hours. We were so impressed with ourselves we got everything done so quickly. Said goodbye to Ewen and went back to it, patting ourselves on our backs for not overrunning. And then we realised we missed a shot. Of Ewen’s character arriving. So when that episode comes out, short of some CGI magic, Splish will suddenly be in the room… Other than one broken glass of a wine glass chandelier (which disagreed with the boom bic on a professional level), the only other significant disaster was when I ordered Chinese for the hungry crew. Popped it in the oven to keep warm. Popped in, still in plastic bags that is. In my defence, I had only had four hours sleep a night for the past four nights. The following day I burnt the chips. In future, if we had a budget for such things, I might delegate the catering.
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I wanted to do six episodes of varying length of the webseries and it was after attending a couple of events and courses with Digital Creators in London that it became clear this was a bad idea. You see, looking at the footage of the pilot, I realised we had about 20 minutes of material and the overwhelming advice I was getting was to keep ‘episodes’ to up to five minutes. Our plan was to edit and the release the pilot and then crowdfund the series. The choice, as I saw it was to produce a tight five minute version of the pilot or rethink the whole project and make each episode muti-part serials of five minutes each. We opted for the latter and I rewrote the pilot after shooting it into a multi-part version. This meant losing some bits which went on too long for pace and also filming some new bits. As this is a spoof documentary, I thought the two changes to bring in were talking heads and a narrator. Hopefully, it will be the better for it when all finished and put together. |
AuthorAndrew Rimmer Archives
December 2016
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