BFI Production Week - Day 1

Production week with the BFI where I my other 5 colleagues would create a 5 minute or less short film within the space of 5 days!

We had already been set our teams the week before, I myself was going to be working on the fiction film along with Alex, Lili, Anna, Hanna & Ben. I was very excited and keen to get on.

Day 1: Ideas
Day one began with a quick ideas session from Bell again, designed to get our creative minds rolling! We were asked to chose a picture at random and generate from that a sci-fi story behind it. I chose a picture of an oil rig moored up on a coastline, to which I created the story of how an alien species had hijacked the rig and stolen all of its oil, leaving it drifting out in the ocean and had been doing this for centuries, explaining the massive oil crisis we are currently experiencing.
As a group though, I think we found this exercise rather restraining as we all felt ready and rearing to go create these films and so thought it was a slight waste of time.
Anyway, moving on, myself and my team were introduced to Guy Myhill,

Guy Myhill - Writer/Director of 'The Goob'

our production manager and industry expert who is currently in the process of releasing his latest film 'The Goob' featuring a new, upcoming and local actor, Liam Walpole.

We quickly got to each other's strengths/weaknesses, roles etc. I was deemed most suitable at being sound and editor of the piece we would finally create as these are the two areas I personally feel strongest at and most experienced in. Alex and Ben both opted to be the Director of what we would eventually create while Hanna and Anna would be writers/producers.

Liam Walpole acting in his recent film 'The Goob'

We then began brainstorming. It quickly became clear we each had different ideas for what film we should make. My own idea involved more technology based stimuli while Anna's involved an animation approach and Ben's focussed more on futuristic style setting.
We tried combining all these ideas but we felt this undermined each individual idea. So to solve this, we decided just to create all three! We split up into sub-teams with myself and Alex working on my own developed idea, Ben and Hanna working toward the futuristic film and Anna and Lili working on the animation.

Group members (clockwise), Myself, Ben, Lili, Guy, Hanna,
Anna, Alex

Me and Alex soon decided for the best chance for getting the film done in time that we would have to film the next day on the tuesday. Our idea we had already set down, where there would be a man and his dog walking through the woods when the dog runs off and is eventually abducted by a mysterious being leaving the man fleeing in terror for his life. So in order to be able to do that, we were required to complete our entire pre-production in less than half a day! That included writing up a shot list, call card and organise actors to act in and be on location! We divided up again, I took care of the shot list while Alex wrote up the call card.

Shot listing

Guy then suggested we bring in Liam from his film as to be the actor in our own, as he would be easy to bring in, work with and thinking further ahead, would be easier to advertise the film if we had a professional and recognised actor taking part in it.
Only thing remained was our location, we knew we wanted to film in a woodland area but were unfamiliar with any local woodlands which we would be able to use without interruption from other dog walkers and recreational users. Elli was thankfully able to help us there (the programme leader) as she knew her parents had recently bought up several acres of woodland in local Coltishall which we would be able to use free of charge (which was extremely useful as we had already used 2/3rd's of the budget paying for Liam to be on set leaving only a 1/3rd left for the other two sub-groups!)!

So everything was set! We would use my own dog as the dog in the film as I would be able to handle her and I felt she was well trained enough to be suitable. We would also bring in Liam as our main actor for a price of £100 for the day! We'd then be filming on Elli's parents land, just 7 miles from our base at Epic Studios in Norwich and we would use equipment from both Guy and Culture Work's East.