AHHHH PRE-PRODUCTION… :)
Today’s entertainment: Rachel as Salvador Dali. Simply beautiful!
This week has been stupidly busy and gone stupidly fast! We had a negative day… one of the days… which day? I don’t know, it’s all a blur! But it all seemed to be going wrong and was awful etc. but since then, it’s started majorly looking up. We found a dance studio location, which we’re having to pay for but they’re giving us a good price (oh the joy of haggling). They don’t have a corridor (its in a gym) so we’re going to set that section in the inside of our EXT ballet school location (the NUCA entrance at St George’s St. Shhh…), which I’m happy with. The doorway is perfect! We’re having a little less luck with the problem with the other location… it’s looking doubtful, but we’re stupidly well prepared for that section, so moving to another location shouldn’t be too much of a problem, really.
We had a totally awesome full cast rehearsal last night - it was amazing to see the characters coming to life… I feel like it’s something I haven’t seen before. It’s amazing to see something you’ve written come off the page… actually, it was even better than I had originally imagined it! All of our cast are fantastic - we played around a bit with different kinds of voices and accents and we’ve settled on some things that work really well. Lucy, who is playing Esmerelda, our Fortune Teller, runs a theatre company called Hocus Pocus. She offered to lend us some costume pieces so we went down after the rehearsal with Mel (who’s playing Flea) to pick out a costume for the ‘grand finale’. I’m really happy with the costume we chose - it’s not the colour that we originally wanted, but I think it’s going to work really well. Grace also had a really lovely idea of how we could cover a tattoo which she has on her arm (we didn’t think that Flea’s mother would EVER let her have one so…). So I’m all happy and excited about that. The other costumes have come together well too - Lucy’s bringing her own costume, as she actually has a gypsy act of her own that she performs on stage. Fagin is bringing his own costume, as is Red, and Tam’s bought some separate bits for Sachi, but she’s also bringing her own costume which we selected for the finale. Birdy’s wings arrived the other day (they were really awkward to carry on a bike by the way… perhaps I should have just put them on??) and they’re looking great. We’re borrowing Flea’s ballet costume from a lovely friend of mine, so that’s all coming together too. Yay!
Today we started painting our gypsy caravan, which has now been set up in my yard, ready to shoot on Friday. Rachel’s helping us out with the painting, and we ran around like fools this morning borrowing paint and buying paint… fun stuff! I also picked up a load of props that we’re borrowing to make the yard look luscious and lovely! Lots of nice rugs, candle holders and throws, blankets, cushions etc. Basically, I pretty much emptied Will’s house :D I borrowed a really lovely candle lantern which holds a load of tea lights too. Excited!
Earlier today we went to have a look at another dance studio, which was lovely, but it doesn’t fit into our schedule and… well, quite frankly, we can’t afford it… This evening me and Tomm went through and made up a proper shot list for the two shoots on Friday. It took ages, but I think it’s really worth it and it’s going to make the shoot so much smoother.
I’m bloody knackered. Same again tomorrow? Yes please.
Hey, did I mention that we had some track and dolly training the other day? It was fun! It’s good to know that it’s fiddly to set up… I want to play moooore…!
NUCA Film and Moving Image Production Blog
