Filming log: Home

I remember from my theatre days the exhausted thrill of production week: working from 9am til midnight, stumbling around school like a zombie*, normal eating habits obliterated and replaced with what could be found in Tescos. The level of obsession where you can recite not only your lines, but everyone else's as well. At double speed.

Well, Home has had a rather similar effect. 

This rather sums up the level my brain has been operating on:

Were it not for the generous intervention of my sister, I would have just eaten a meal of noodles and digestive biscuits several times.

Our first location was the Necropolis, and as a whole it went smoothly although there was conflict, and there was extreme cold, and there was a breeze which made our balloon behave exactly the opposite to what we wanted. Fiona, our actress, was perfectly lovely and up for all the crazy things we asked her to do. Also, her hair is amazing.

The less said about our seedy alleyway location the better. Suffice to say, it lived up to the adjective "seedy" and beyond.

We also filmed a little at mine, where we saw for ourselves that bringing lights into the equation makes everything take twice as long. Upon reflection, the Dedo kit we took out was insufficient to light my living room, which is very large. It's a shame, because we couldn't get the wide shot we wanted without it looking unbearably stagey so we did what we could and adjusted the framing.

Out in the park things went surprisingly smoothly! We had our obligatory run-ins with methadone spitting jaekies and the weather constantly threatened us with a downpour but it held out just long enough for us to get our shots. The wind frustrated us in our balloon-wrangling attempts and also threatened to send some throw cushions into orbit. Everyone in a high-vis jacket wanted to talk to us but Murray just flourished his email from Brian Scott and doors were miraculously opened.

In fact, Murray has quite a talent for opening doors. I thought for a while we was a magician of some kind, but it became clear that he must be a Jedi; he waves his hand and officials fall over themselves to give him free parking or access to remote locations. He says "jump" and they say "how high?".

Matt, our other actor, was a right laugh and he and Fiona hit it off well enough that getting them to kiss wasn't quite as excruciating as I was expecting it to be. I wasn't really looking forward to it, but it really wasn't so bad.

The only thing left to mention is the tragedy of the Dog Who Stole Lunch: for the sustenance of the cast and crew I cooked three pizzas the night before and brought them along for delicious cold pizza snacking; a pack of dogs decided to join in and after circling us and howling (probably auditioning for when we make a western) it dived in and swallowed a slice whole, slobbering all over what was left. Tragic.

Things I have learnt:

• the importance of everyone sitting down and thrashing out the details
• spending all of one's time wandering the west end of glasgow is tiring
• Murray's phone has some brilliant 90s tunes on it, and Ada and I will dance to them in the back seat of his car
• the Necropolis is surprisingly lovely
• if you choose to use a location beside the river, be prepared to turn up and find the police already there 
• I can survive on fried eggs and toast for a long time but it's a bad idea
• charm is essential
• never work with children, animals, or balloons
• tea and biscuits are always welcome
• you can make a lily open with a hair drier with a diffuser attached (thanks Ada's boyfriend's mum!) but that won't stop it from becoming so battered it's unusable
• thermal socks are a godsend
• nattily, you can import a spreadsheet of your timecodes into Final Cut making batch capture a whole tonne easier

Now I just want to see the footage and get on with the editing - it's going to be exciting!

So here's a goal: let's try and keep my life on track at the same time as making a film next time! That means: housework, cooking actual meals and seeing people not directly involved in the film. This may be the least achievable goal I've ever set.

*I have looked back on notes made during production weeks and had no memory of a topic ever being taught