Boards n' Booms

See these scribblings of a madman? These are the storyboards from shooting days 1 & 2.

The one on the right with the marker pen? The whole sketch is that of my room which is the set for my characters room in the movie. The blue boxes with arrows show which way the camera is meant to go and what to focus on. This is the opening shot of the movie and it was meant to be one long take a la the opening of Back to the Future in Doc's lab 'cos I thought that was a great way to open a movie.

Only thing is, the room isn't exactly as cool and as character descriptive as Doc's. Nor did we have a steadicam. I was hoping Ariff would bring his makeshift DIY steadicam but apparently it has a tendency to scratch the camera. Ain't nobody scratching my baby.

Of course, just having boards isn't exactly enough (as you can see).

Then it comes to the whole scheduling thing. Diana made this great Excel spreadsheet which made life a whole load easier.

Every scene is written down, showing whether it's internal or external, day or night, what location, which actors, what props required, any special requirements and whatever extra notes we may have.

You could then view any piece of data based on a specific category. Say, for example, we were scheduling a day where we'd only be in one location: 'Jo's House', and we were only going to do the internal shots. We'd click 'Jo's House' and 'Int' and voila! We have our schedule sheet for the day.

I know all you people out there proficient in Excel think this is no big deal, but I reckon it's fucking genius. You have no idea how much time was saved with this spreadsheet.

As you can see in the pic, this is the schedule for day 2. We were supposed to shoot ALL those scenes. The bits ticked are the ones we actually shot. Behind schedule much?




Then there's that microphone I was talking about. The stereo mic that was mono. Here it is in all it's glory and I quite honestly haven't found one since. It's some unknown brand.




That pink bandana over there (a remnant from our company trip last year. I was in the pink team, which led to many a recitation of Reservoir Dogs) is there to stop the mic from picking up too much of the shakes. This is especially important when your soundman is Ahmad, a man prone to breathing heavily to the point where his whole body moves.




We only had my tiny mic stand, so with the cunning use of gaffer tape we attached it to a long stick my maid found out back. This... is my BOOM stick!

I've started uploading photos at Flickr to make things easier. You can check out my Flickr page by clicking here or clicking any of the photos.

Now, I'm off to edit some more of the movie before shooting tomorrow.