Love, Mugs and Stickmen

Love, Mugs and Stickmen...What a sickeningly sweet film.

The ‘Stickman’ team have just finished our first days shooting on the film and all indications are that it’s going great –for now.
First of all, I thought I’d just blog a bit on the actual script itself. I really find it quite hard to believe that we are actually now filming the script; after all I didn’t really expect mine to be chosen for production at all. I’m also incredibly excited that I am allowed to direc- (I mean) author the script I have written.In fact, I might just mention my thoughts on this whole ‘Authoring’ business whilst I’m here.
I know that Adam would like us to avoid using the title ‘director’ during this production and replace it with (the incredibly vague) role of ‘Author’ -but I don’t think I entirely agree with the idea.
Don’t get me wrong, I can surely see that there is a point to this alternate title. It encourages more of a team effort whilst simultaneously keeping any delusions of grandeur, which might occur, at bay.
However, when in a film production like this I think it’s necessary to have someone to co-ordinate and oversee the film in its making, and this job is the ‘director’s’. And to be perfectly honest that is what I believe Gavin and I are thought of as in these shoots –directors. Surely the term ‘author’ implies the same duties but holds just a different spelling. So similar are the two titles of ‘author’ and ‘director’ that Adam himself has slipped in and out of the use of director.
I’m of the opinion that we shouldn’t need to use the title of ‘author’ in place of ‘director’, as it means the same thing. If we have a separate name for director we may as well rename all the roles of Director of Photography, Producer, 1st AD, Camera Operator etc. But we won’t, because that’s just silly.
Anyway, I’ve ranted on about this far longer than I should have, back to the film.

Today’s shoot was pretty fantastic to be honest. I loved every minute of it, surprisingly; I still loved it when the stress factor kicked in. Everyone worked really well together and did each of their job to the best of their abilities. The end result was a day’s worth of pretty good decent footage if you ask me. Sure, there will probably be a good few continuity errors etc. But on the whole, I think our team did a really good job today.

I was really quite nervous at the very start of the day, as I wasn’t sure if I could handle my job as good as I had to. However, within the first hour I realised that, when you have a crew who know their jobs everything becomes a little smoother. Shots that looked good in my head had to be reworked to an extent but we managed to keep to our set-up schedule pretty well, thanks mainly to Phil's hard work.
There was one track shot that I was particularly pleased with, I won’t say which one exactly but; I told you it would work great Phil, I can’t believe you wanted to do it without the track.

For myself at least, I really enjoyed the whole experience of the shoot for the day’s first half...Then came Ray.
It hadn’t quite registered with me when we were told Ray would be checking up on the shoots, and it kind of slipped my mind –until of course he was on his way up. Well it sort of added a little bit of stress to the atmosphere of the shoot, at least on my part. I started checking to see if we had set all the kit up in a safe and proper fashion. It added a bit of extra worry, that Ray would pick us up for having a light that was dangerously rigged or something of that nature. But I think we were ok…I think.
We shot the bulk of the closing scene last thing in the schedule today. I was really happy with the footage we got and I think it will cut together well. Yet, when we were filming the final actor shots, I was watching the monitor and thought to myself; “This is soo damned cheesy, it’s unreal!

Cast-wise I think we were also fairly lucky. All three principle characters performed as desired. I just felt a bit sorry for the two female actresses, who spent most of the shoot sitting in a chair doing nothing. But other than apologising there wasn’t anything we could do to change that. I think we were all fairly happy with our actor cast in the role of ‘Stan’. I, at least, was really happy with the performance he gave. On the whole it was a really good shoot, we kept on schedule, everyone performed well together and we got some really good takes. I’ve not enjoyed myself that much in years (I’m not too sure if that’s sad or not).

Now I just hope we can finish the film tomorrow so we at least have a complete story to cut together. I’m sure we’ll all do fine though.