And Now We Play The Waiting Game

After many hours in the editingroom, it's finally over. The movie, for all intents and purposes, has been finished. There has been test-screenings, and people actually DO get the story, and responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Tomorrow then is the premiere, and later the galla-party/ awards ceremony, for which we have no expectations. But a wee acknowledgement would be nice, as they usually come in the form of a whiskey-bottle. The movie ended up being called "Glædelig Jul", btw...

Oh My Gawd!!!

We are finally about done with shooting the film now. All the scenes are in the can, and what's more, you can actually see what's going on. We now have enough footage to turn into a movie. Tomorrow we just have to go downtown and get some stills of "christmas in the city" and then it's time to edit like the wind. I think it's fair to say that everybody is getting a bit fed-up with this project, but hopefully it's smooth sailing from here. Knock on wood.

By the way, there was an article in a local newspaper for Viborg about our movie, as it turns out our Santa is a bit of a local celebrity. Good stuff!

A Stunning Return to Form

Day 4.

Today's shootings got halted up a bit, because Santa's car broke down. Not to often you get to write that sentence. But everything worked accoreding to our already belated plan, and we got a lot of great footage of Santa acting like a maniac on the mainstreet. The culmination for me was when a group of Japanese tourists went to get their photo taken with Santa, without knowing they were being filmed. That's the kind of stuff that wins you awards. We shot for about twelve hours, and I'm to tired to write anything more, but we got two scenes in the bag. And after tomorrow we should be done shooting, and with a bit of luck I might catch all of the Arsenal game tommorow. Or is it already today? Too tired.... For now I need to sleeeeeeep.

Peace of Mind

Day 3.

Actually everything went according to plan. That is, when you're filming a three year old child, all plans go out the window, and you just take what you can get. But the new, third, camera worked, and the day was otherwise uneventful. How very dissapointing!

On the first day of Christmas...

So the story begins. I have decided to keep a log of what happens while we try to shoot our 2nd film production. Our first film, popularly known as 'Hey!', was a 1 minute thriller about a girl being chased. Thrilling stuff, that was. It was however severely plagued by a dysfunctional camera, which made it kinda hard to see what went on. And there's not much room for explaining in just one minute.

Our second movie, for now known as 'Santa's Suicide' or 'Gamle Nikolaj', is deeply disturbing tale of Santa's demise following some wacky misunderstandings.

Day 1.

We started shooting down at the harbour, where we needed to get a lot of shots of Santa looking sad and gloomy, drinking glögg, and what not. Actually we shot from about 8.30 AM to 2.00 PM, getting great shots of Santa weeping, the harbour looking depressing, Jakob (The director du jour) throwing a big hunk of metal into the water to make splashing sounds and bubbles. The greatest moment however was getting the shot of Santa walking into the sunset in his underwear. Santa, it should be mentioned, is a 70+ years old amateur actor called Laurits, and how we ever got him to do it, I will never figure out.
When we returned to our editingroom to watch our dailys, it was apparent that we had, once again been given a dysfunctional camera. All our recording were utterly and completely useless. About this time I was ready to kill somebody.

It's Never Over.

Day 2.

I didn't go to the shoot today, because I had to work, but I talked to Andreas (camera-guy du jour), and here's the highlights from our conversation.

Andreas: Well, our new camera was broken as well, so everything we shot was rubbish.
Roy: Jeez, you don't say.
Andreas: Yeah, same old, same old.
(Blah blah blah)
Andreas: And on the way down to the shoot, I crashed on my bike, so I wasn't there either.
Roy: No way?!?
Andreas: Way! I had 6 stitches on my jaw...

So, after 2 days we have absolutely nothing in the can. And we have an injured man in our group. And we had an emergency meeting in our group, and rescheduled some stuff, and got anew (3rd!) camera. So now I think we're over the hump.