Lazarus Day 3
Wow a this is like 3 regular updates in a row! It gets worse the next is already done and is lurking in the shadows like a ninja, just waiting for the right time to strike! Clearly only one of 2 things can be happening here.
1. I have a couple of days off work.
2. I really should be doing something else and this is task avoidance.
Okay I’ll give you the possibility that there is a 3rd option: All of the above! But the truth is you probably don’t care, you just want to read the post. Well ok then, scroll down a little and have a gander at the next chunk of shooting schedule
So Saturday 25/03/06 what did we shoot today? Absolutely nothing! You might remember I mentioned a big bombshell well this was it. At 6 days notice the producers decided that the actual nuclear bunker I had arranged to use for an impossibly small amount of money was too far away. 6 days notice. I had made it clear back in January that it was in Essex (120 miles each way) and that travel time was entirely dependant on the driver and the conditions on the M25 but would, in my experience, fall between 2 and 7 hours. I had also made it clear that the episode’s entire allocated budget should be used to pay for the petrol. I hadn’t made it clear that I intended to pick up the rest of the tab myself (I figured as script writer any over spend was my fault) but that’s going off on a tangent.
My original plan for the weekend was simple. Drive up on the Saturday, leaving Southampton at about 16:00 to arrive in Essex between 18:00 and 19:00. Have dinner at the bunker (An LRP event was already being catered for and we could eat with them) start filming about 20:00 carry on shooting through till 02:00 on the Sunday morning. Drivers being sent to bed around 11:00ish to make sure they got a good night’s sleep. If shooting over ran? Well so long as the drivers got a good night’s sleep, everybody else could sleep in the cars on the way home. We’d all get kicked out of bed at 08:30, have a nice full English breakfast at the bunker, before leaving at 09:30 to drive back to Southampton.
Turns out nobody wanted to stay the night. Nobody wanted to drive back from Essex at 2am in the morning, and if we left earlier we wouldn’t get enough shooting time. Which is fair enough, all of those are good points. It’s just that this was the plan back at the end of January. A little more than 6 days notice would have been nice, it’s safe to say I was a little narked by this turn of events. How narked? Well if Agent Graves had turned up at my door with an attaché case, I would have used the contents!
What the hell do you do when you need a new location at such short notice? Well you talk to Big Steve. He sorted it out for us to use Fareham college as a replacement for the bunker, and to be fair in the final cut it looks pretty darn good. But 6 days notice!
There was of course one final twist of fate to come. I had swapped shifts at work to get the Saturday off for shooting. We could only get into the college on a Tuesday evening. Guess what shift I’d swapped for the Saturday and now couldn’t swap back?
Meh!
1. I have a couple of days off work.
2. I really should be doing something else and this is task avoidance.
Okay I’ll give you the possibility that there is a 3rd option: All of the above! But the truth is you probably don’t care, you just want to read the post. Well ok then, scroll down a little and have a gander at the next chunk of shooting schedule
So Saturday 25/03/06 what did we shoot today? Absolutely nothing! You might remember I mentioned a big bombshell well this was it. At 6 days notice the producers decided that the actual nuclear bunker I had arranged to use for an impossibly small amount of money was too far away. 6 days notice. I had made it clear back in January that it was in Essex (120 miles each way) and that travel time was entirely dependant on the driver and the conditions on the M25 but would, in my experience, fall between 2 and 7 hours. I had also made it clear that the episode’s entire allocated budget should be used to pay for the petrol. I hadn’t made it clear that I intended to pick up the rest of the tab myself (I figured as script writer any over spend was my fault) but that’s going off on a tangent.
My original plan for the weekend was simple. Drive up on the Saturday, leaving Southampton at about 16:00 to arrive in Essex between 18:00 and 19:00. Have dinner at the bunker (An LRP event was already being catered for and we could eat with them) start filming about 20:00 carry on shooting through till 02:00 on the Sunday morning. Drivers being sent to bed around 11:00ish to make sure they got a good night’s sleep. If shooting over ran? Well so long as the drivers got a good night’s sleep, everybody else could sleep in the cars on the way home. We’d all get kicked out of bed at 08:30, have a nice full English breakfast at the bunker, before leaving at 09:30 to drive back to Southampton.
Turns out nobody wanted to stay the night. Nobody wanted to drive back from Essex at 2am in the morning, and if we left earlier we wouldn’t get enough shooting time. Which is fair enough, all of those are good points. It’s just that this was the plan back at the end of January. A little more than 6 days notice would have been nice, it’s safe to say I was a little narked by this turn of events. How narked? Well if Agent Graves had turned up at my door with an attaché case, I would have used the contents!
What the hell do you do when you need a new location at such short notice? Well you talk to Big Steve. He sorted it out for us to use Fareham college as a replacement for the bunker, and to be fair in the final cut it looks pretty darn good. But 6 days notice!
There was of course one final twist of fate to come. I had swapped shifts at work to get the Saturday off for shooting. We could only get into the college on a Tuesday evening. Guess what shift I’d swapped for the Saturday and now couldn’t swap back?
Meh!
11 Comments:
We do care. Sort of.
But post more often, then hopefully you can get on to actually talking about Echo Black!
PS: Great 100 Bullets reference
The good news is I've actually got the next 2 post's lined up ready to go.
But I have a noticable tendancy to stick up a lot of posts in a short amount of time, then not bother writting any more for a couple of weeks.
So in the interests of trying to be a bit more regular I'm only planning on posting one article a week.
This way the surplus I have at the moment will nicely run into the next batch I write.
It all makes sense in a funny kind of way :)
Hey, I agree that 6 days was naff. But you fail to include in your fascinating blog that the two drivers were the sound man (Jon) and the main cameraman (Matt), neither of whom could have slept while we filmed. Their roles were the most exhausting (you try holding a heavy boom for hours at a time in the air!) and I perfectly understood their resistance to go ahead. Keep up the good work with the blog - and looking forward to Lazarus 2!
Steve
Not using the location isn't the issue. Not saying anything for weeks and then piping up after its all arranged, thus making us seem unreliable to the owner, and potentially preventing us from using the location in the future, is a problem however.
Pete
I freely admit that I didn't go into every single little detail regarding the cancellation of the location.
I just put down the biggies, which were perfectly valid. A fact that I stated in the post, then I moved on with the narrative.
Does the world need to know that, I was wearing an onion on my belt, as was the fashion at the time?
Is the fact that on the day I found out the location was cancelled, I was wearing one green sock and one black sock relevent?
If I put every tiny little detail into print this blog would be ten times as big as it is, and I'd still be talking about the summer of 2001!
It wasn't quite a case of "piping up" about saying no to the shoot. There was a sense of uncertainty all along, no-one had ever confirmed anything. I thought it would be a great shoot, but I can't make people do something. We were only told minor details about the shoot, as Steve points out in his blog he never told us how much effort he had put into this shoot. From my perceptive, people were going to the place anyway, the filming was an add-on. It makes it sound like we stitched Steve up a treat, but it really wasn't like that. Nothing was ever crystal clear. The story still looks good though.
Steve
I confirmed the location in an email to one of the producers on Saturday 11/02/06 6 weeks previous to the shooting day in question.
The initial production schedule was sent out on the 13/02/06 by the producers. This schedule stated that on the 25/03/06 we would be shooting at the bunker in Essex.
Due to a change in the date we could access Fort Widley (producers notified 23/02/06) A second revised schedule was sent out on the 05/03/06 This also stated we would be shooting at the bunker in Essex.
Now I have absolutly no idea exactly how or when the decision was made to cancel.
But I do know that nobody contacted me to clear up any uncertainty.
I don't think it was a stitch up. I think it was a monumental failiure in communication.
All in all, I'm sure Essex would have been an amazing place to shoot at, but hey' Widley was an amazing place to shoot at, and I enjoyed shouting "ACTION!!!!!!!!!" Down them there tunnels, and watching peoples faces of fear as they were chased by a hoard of evil post dead zombified people who spat black stuff when they hit the ground.
Dan
Hell yeah! Widley was an awsome place to shoot, and as I said in the blog, Fareham Collage worked very nicely as an alternative for the bunker.
It all worked out nicely in the end.
Widley still stands as one of the most enjoyable filming shoots ive had with Beacon Producitons in two decades - and thats a lot of filming days! The professionalism of the zombies sticks in my mind, hats off to them all - and the fantastic work of the make up artist, the gloomy surroundings - pah to the bruises and cuts I sustained that day - I'd definitely do it all again!
Steve
Okay but no more talk of Widley, save that for the comments section on the enevitable widley post :)
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