the wacky wombat weblog

I realise nothing can be better than a hot hot shower and a nice scrub after a long hard day of shooting. Plus a good bed later of course! It’ll be even better if I had a foot scrub and massage. ahhh. But it’s ok.

Today was the first day of my short-film shoot for my group’s final year project. So stressful, because it was a shoot at the MRT station in land of ulu-ness Buangkok, and we only had 6 hours to finish everything.

As usual with every few of our shoots, some technical issue will crop up, and no one will be able to fix it, even if we called the school, which we did. So, we went ahead anyway despite the picture not being exactly what we wanted, because we only had this one chance today at the MRT.

So basically it was just us 4 girls running around with our camera equipment, hoping on and off trains, pointing camera everywhere, drawing stares from everyone, and attracted some kids to come inspect further. >.<

Sigh, we barely managed to finish everything. But thank god we did, albeit having to do with just 1 takes for many shots. Although the very pretty opening sequence will probably have to be dumped cos it only looked pretty in my mind but not in real life when it didn’t work out on camera. Argh! Heartache. But ok, I’ll leave that to worry in post-production.

I think the most heartaching thing, is to know of all the creative possibilities that you can have with your mind, but you’re just restricted by money by equipment by skills. OK, correction, basically it’s just by money. Money means we can rent better and lighter cameras (not bulky ancient non-industry-practice D9s, tho’ it does look good). Money means we can hire people to work for us and get tons of extras and PAs and professional crew (not just 4 of us scramble here and there).

I was just watching Studio 60, and I’m like, if only we have money! We could have proper set design, wardrobe, proper lighting, great cameras, use tracks, steadycams and omg cranes! And everyone will fall over themselves to agree to let us use their place to shoot and what not. haha ok maybe not that. But yeah, they’re Hollywood and I’m a pathetic zero-budget student production on 20-year-old technology and only 4 pair of hands.

Nonetheless, stress aside, it was kinda exciting. And damn scary at the same time. Ugh. That’s why I like and hate production. Why didn’t I just go and be a journalist? But I guess I’m not that type of intellectual.

Anyways, shoot continues again on Saturday, and it’s gonna be a marathon all the way till next Thurs. Hopefully it’ll be a wrap by then (stretching it any longer means saying sayonara to more of our precious moolah). Pray everything goes well, and pray someone decides to sponsor us 3k! haha. Anyone out there know anyone with money to spare for a group of budding filmmakers? hehe.

Tomorrow we’ll be dressing our next set (and also, I suspect, the crew’s ‘home’ for the next few days). Meanwhile, I’m just gonna go clear out my brain a bit before populating it with a new list of to-dos and shot list and etc tomorrow.  Wish me luck for the week!