YR2 – WORK EXPERIENCE – ACROSS THE POND PART TWO

The second day really didn’t move too well. It got off to the worst start when we found out that none of the audio from the shoot the day before was usable. This kind of confused me seeing as the camera man and the sound girl were supposed to be professionals, yet both failed to recognise the settings on the camera were wrong. That it was set to mic input instead of line input, something we were taught in the first week of learning about audio. This meant that we had to go back to the same location as the day before and do it all over again, which wasn’t very welcomed considering it was sheltered from the sun and it was freezing.

After finishing up in that location in the morning, we moved on to the next, filming actor Pete Nicholls reading Shakespeare’s “to be, or not to be” speech from Hamlet whilst standing on top of a bench in town. This was kind of embarrassing. The piece he was acting was so cliché, everybody knows it so well that it’s just a bit cringe-worthy to hear it now, especially outside a theatrical environment. I did feel sorry for him, reading out the same lines over and over again. At least we had big coats and scarves on. All he had to keep himself warm was the breeziest of shirts. He was shaking so bad you would have thought he had drunk a barrel of RedBull. I really don’t know why it was taking us so long to get just a few shots. I think there could have been a lot more preparation, a storyboard maybe. Another thing that they failed to take into consideration was the lighting. The location was smack in the middle of a line of buildings, which was fine at noon, but as soon as the sun started to dip, a big fat shadow appeared half way up Petes body. Somehow the directors seemed to think this wouldn’t affect the continuity, I failed to share their optimism.


Most of these days were spent standing around waiting for what seemed to be nothing at all. I know film sets have a reputation of being incredibly slow, but that’s when there are millions of pounds resting on the high quality result and need everything to be perfect. We had everything we had available to us on location. All this waiting around could have and should have been avoided. We could have got so much more done if more preparation had been made.