A little Hiatus

Hi all,
I've taken a week off to spend time with the family. The film is in the very capable hands of our fabulous editor, Anna Maria, and I will hope to be able to give you a proper update next week.

As for now it's a few days with the kids in the south of Ireland.

Still have the city centre montage stuff to shoot - I'm waiting to see if anything needs reshooting before setting a date for this.

As for the overall feature, I think it's 9 segments have shot now, with a whole raft of them to shoot in early August.

The momentus is growing!

Fingal Independent

The Fingal Independent ran a nice article on the film - check it out. It's in the current edition.

Written by Rory Bonass.

A full page, I'm suitably impressed!

I'm also delighted for Audrey and the Sweet Emporium, all much deserved publicity.

And now for the hard part...

So I've finished the very rough cut.

As always, it's just at this stage that your initial energy runs out as you begin to see exactly how much work is left - the sound needs mixing, the edit needs locking, at least one shot needs picking up, it needs grading et cetera et cetera.

For me, this is always the hardest part, as a lot of it is technical rather than creative.

The best way to get through this is to get creative technical people to help! A fresh pair of eyes and ears are vital, especially those who can benefit the film through their expertise.

So I've asked someone to come on board, and I'm going to put the feelers out for someone to help with the post production sound mix. It could be you. :-)

There is some good news too - it's really taking shape. Can't wait to progress it.

Rain halts play...

So the montage sequence will have to wait.

The rainy forecast has meant postponing the last day's shooting until it clears up. I thought I had a very busy schedule coming up, but I rather unexpectedly have some time off, so maybe I won't have to wait too long to shoot it.

To be honest, it's probably a good idea anyhow, I'm cutting the film tomorrow afternoon/night - just a rough cut, but I should get an idea if I need to reshoot or pick up anything. I don't think I do, but I suppose you never know.

One thing I'm sure of, I've got LOADS of footage. In some ways, it makes cutting harder, as you end up cutting for the sake of it, which should be avoided. I don't like to cut unless you need to.

In fact, I left one scene, the most emotionally bare scene in the film, without any cuts at all, to try and make it stand out from the rest of the film, to feel more natural and real. Watch out for it.

Let the logging begin

Over the last few 2 days I've taken on the task of importing, copying, converting and logging the footage of Heartshaped. All 110 gigabites of it! While shooting on 2 cameras is extremely helpful when shooting with kids, it leads to a hell of a lot of footage!

I'm almost finished breaking down the footage by scene, and looking back through it, I'm quite relieved. The huge amount of takes on the kids seem to have been worth it, the reactions are there as are the deliveries.

The adults I wasn't worried about and with good reason - they're great. Very natural and strong.

Once the footage is logged I plan on doing a rough cut of a few scenes by Sunday, to give me an idea of where we are.

Of course I also have to shoot the rest of the montage stuff this weekend, as well as a demanding day job for the next 7 weeks!

I must be very wicked.

No rest for me.

Wrrrrraaaaaaaaaapppppedddddd

After a long and fruitful nearly three day shoot we finally wrapped. A massive thank you to all involved, in particular the two young actors, Jamie and Ben de Barra, the three 'old' actors, Jonathan Caffrey, Natasha Quirke and Fergal Cleary. And, of course, the amazing hardworking crew.

As anyone who has ever worked with kids can tell you, it's a hard experience, for both them and you. They get tired. They get bored. They find it hard to hold concentration. But it's worth it - they look fantastic, performed well and will hopefully melt a few hearts out there.

Day one was hectic, we had a lot on the callsheet. We had no major issues, but fell behind due to the kids needing more time and space to themselves than anticipated. Lesson learned for day two.

Day two started great, lost a bit of pace in the middle and wound to a halt just before anticipated wrap time. We shot out Natasha's parts of the remaining scenes and let the boys have tea and play games. I have to say, by day 3, Jamie was like a pro on set. He really began to understand the filmmaking process.

Day three picked up the remaining scenes from day 2, and was slow as we were matching shots from scenes we shot the previous day. We wrapped, had an AMAZING sunday dinner courtesy of Mrs. Whearty, and went home happy and full!

We now have to shoot the montage sequence in Dublin next weekend - it's pretty straightforward stuff with a small crew. All the drama is shot and dialogue recorded.

Exhausted but happy, proud of everyone involved.


STREAMCAST
We also had some amazing help from Streamcast, a digital Broadcast solutions and Webcasting company who our Director of Photography, Gavin Reilly had worked with before.

They helped us out with camera equipment and we couldn't have done it without them.

Check them out

WWW.STREAMCAST.IE

Radio Silence

So we start shooting in the morning. Don't expect any blog updates until Sunday or Monday night!


JP Whearty, the producer, has almost everything sorted for the 2 1/2 days. A few last minute hiccups successfully avoided, and a few more to come no doubt, but, almost 2 years since I first joined the project, we're going to shoot.

It doesn't quite seem real. In that time we've developed two features, 6 (or is it 7?) drafts of the first, more ambitious project (it WILL need a budget, so we're parking it while we raise finance), and I'm on draft 5 of this one.

Was it a good idea to do this?

Abso-f******g-lutely!

You always find out a lot about people on these sort of shoots - how talented they really are (like our amazing designer Stephanie), how persuasive they really are (our calmly mindcontrolling producer), and who is willing to give up their time for a project with no reward. I've learnt a lot about those who are genuinely heartfelt in their willingness to help, give up their time, throw themselves into the project.

A massive thank you to all the cast and crew.


On that note, once again I have reason to thank the incredible Colin Browne at Film Equipment Hire in Lusk, who has been very supportive of the project.

If you haven't checked out their online equipment catalogue do so now - they're reliable, very reasonable, have a great range and are a joy to deal with. Their range has certainly increased over the last year to include some excellent cameras, glidecam, jib arm et cetera.

www.filmequipmenthire.com