Project Elements

That’s a wrap! The hell of filming has finished, editing is on the shelf; we now have a finished film.

I would like to take the time to thank everyone who has helped on this film, you’ve been fantastic and thanks for putting up with us.

Special thanks go to Staffordshire University, BTPodShow, Youthcomm & Worcestershire County Council, New Labour, Keyone Productions, Heather & Mike, Dan Hayne, Dave Tyrrell, Nick McCartney, David Kidney, Adrian Newman, Becky Maynard and last but by no means least Adam Curry.

Without further ado I would now like to present the finished article in all of its glory; it’s been hell, but it’s been fun.

Download (Right Click > Save As…)

I hope that you’ve enjoyed the journey… see you soon!

Chris Leydon.

So with a lot of luck the film has finally been filmed. As you’ve heard we had a bit of trouble getting a camera at first but luckily we were able to get hold of one, although not one from university, as usual they were all out. We spent a long day Monday walking round Worcester trying to gather all the equipment we needed. When we finally got to filming it had been a long day, we planned to use a generator to power lights so we could film at dark, unfortunately we couldn’t get it working and only got a little footage done as it was getting dark. Tuesday was another long day but we finally had some productivity with filming. We shot everything we needed over a long day that from the very beggining was gruelling. And when we looked back at the footage we were dissapointed by the results, which meant one thing, a re-shoot. With time bearing down on us we decided to keep to Stafford and set out to film Thursday. Again we had to find another actor and luckily one came through, so yesterday we began and finished the filming. The next stage, editing.

Ben Proctor

Why is it that good news is usually accompanied by bad news?

The good news is that we have our actors, always a plus. The bad news is that we don’t have a camera. I woke up incredibly early this morning, headed over to the equipment office at the Uni to be turned away and told to come back later, as they were rather busy. I returned at 11 o’clock to be told that there weren’t any cameras available from today until Wednesday, but they’d see what they can do and to pop back again in a bit.

I’m not sure if there’ll be a camera for us or not. If there isn’t then hopefully our backup plan will come into play. We’ve got so many backup plans that they’re almost coming out of our assholes.

It just seems to be one problem after another at the moment.

You may have noticed that the blog was down for most of yesterday, this was due to an unexpected server attack on Keyone Productions. The servers were brute forced attacked and went into panic and shutdown mode. Everything is now all right, and as far as I can tell, and nothing was badly damaged. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank GoDaddy.com and the Keyone Productions web team for all of their hard work in getting us back online.

Let’s see if we can get a camera, we’re supposed to be filming this evening; one of us shall keep you up to date.

Chris Leydon.

It’s the twelfth hour, we’re slightly buggered if truth be told; which let’s face it, it needs to be.

Ben and I together have managed to confirm all of the locations that we were set to do, we have the equipment booked; we have all the makings of a film… apart from the actors. The casting was supposed to be done three weeks ago and hasn’t, so I’m currently running around like a headless chicken trying to find actors.

We’re supposed to be filming on Monday evening in Worcester and Tuesday in Malvern, but do you know how hard it is to find any actors willing to do it? So much for that fact “for every actor that’s in work there are 500 unemployed” - where are they all hiding? Under a rock? We’re willing to pay up to £50 PLUS expenses, but at this late a time we’re having problems getting people to commit.

On a completely unrelated note… if you’re an actor looking for work in the area of Worcestershire and you’re free tomorrow and Tuesday, drop me an email at chris.leydon@keyoneproductions.co.uk - yes it really is getting that desperate.

Now to go and hang our casting director…

Chris Leydon.

The easter holidays have begun but work continues. Since the last post we’ve developed a finalised script, storyboarded it and are at the moment finalising locations. We’re about to start our hunt for actors, we already have a few ideas about who will play who. We may be pushing it a little close to the deadline again but with adequate preparation we should be fine.

Ben Proctor

We had another meeting today to finalize our script and set a plan for when everthing had to be done. It was decdied that google calender would be used to keep track of the set deadlines and what needs to be done and google talk to chat to each other about the project. We also decided on what areas of the project each of us will be taking that has to be done by the dealines set on the calender.

Writing blog posts can be a very hard and tedious thing to do, especially when one hasn’t posted for such a while that they forget and lose interest in the entire thing. Let me bring you up to speed on the entire project, as let’s face it it’s about time someone did.

The documentary was finished, done, dusted and presented on the 18th of February. One will not go into the details on how well we did mark wise, for fear of inflating one’s ego too much. It can be viewed online somewhere, most likely at http://projectelements.btpodshow.com where you can download a High Quality version of the documentary - or somewhere on this blog where you can streamload it.

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It’s been a while since the last post, a lot of stuff has gone down. Why the delay? Well it’s a lot of reasons that at the moment I’m currently not at liberty to discuss. Needless to say this is a little update over the last week and how the second half of our project has begun.

Let’s start from where we left off. Monday morning we prepared the presentation, making sure we’d covered our bases. Next was a trip to the editing labs to put the film onto tape, then it was a simple case of heading up to the screening rooms. We wanted to get it over and done so we went up second. We played the documentary, watching it again I was confident. The next part was the ten minute explanation about the film, what we wanted to achieve, how we went about doing it, that kind of thing. I think we all managed to articulate our views well and it seemed to go down well. We sat back in our seats and watched some other presentations. And that was the work for Monday.

On Tuesday me and Chris started disscussing how we felt we should try and dive straight into the drama, although we’re pleased with the documentary there were hairy moments as time ran away.  We found out the feedback sessions happened in the morning so Chris sent an e-mail and arranged a session for Wednesday.

Feedback was the topic of Wednesday. We met James (one of our lecturers) and he gave us the result, which was a 2.1. Which is good, a First is the best, next in line is a 2.1. So it’s good stuff. His critisisms were the same ones that we had in mind. But it’s left us in good stead with the drama to make.

Thursday was a day off for us. Most of my time was dedicated to a Html assigment, for Chris it was spent blowing off steam by hiring a hareem of Russian prostitutes and demanding, in a coked up haze, for ‘waffles, more waffles’. Chet spent most of his day making some well earned pocket money.

Friday we sat down and knocked out a basic plot for the drama, we also disscussed what we wanted to achieve in what time frame. We decided to get the script done this weekend.

Saturday was another meeting and we delved deeper into the story and main character. We then split up the script into sections and gave each other the task of writing these very sections. This to be done by Sunday.

We’re still waiting on the results. I haven’t started my section yet (I know, God strike me down) but plan on thinking about it in the not too distant future. I went to Chris’ door to hear his side of things but all I heard was panting and a muffled scream. I left it there.

Ben Proctor

A suprisingly simple and quick editing session has come to an end and we have the final product. We worked solid for the whole of yesterday afternoon and today we made the final touches and exported it ready for the presentation. The next thing is to work on the presentation. I’m pleased with the way the documentary’s turned out, both interesting and thought provoking. In my opinion.

Ben Proctor