PRODUCTION NOTES - part 3

I challenge anyone who thinks that making films is easy to undertake the challenge that we have. The past few days have been stressful. I myself undertook a 5 hour journey, meeting and pre-planning location photograph session and an extra 2 hour of journey time (plus twenty minutes on the underground playing musical stations) on only an hours sleep. I apologise to the people of Chatham, Strood, Rochester, Rainham and Gillingham for whose stations I slept through at 10:30 on Tuesday night.

On top of that on the day of shooting I walked out of the location and saw.... snow! Noooo!! It can't snow we have exterior shots to film. Luckily it subsided, apart from the cold and the wind chill which turned quite a few hands blue.

And our poor actress, by poor I mean suffering because in terms of the quality we received this was high end stuff. If the previous actor we worked with is anything to go by she can expect to have leading roles in commercials very soon. Oh how we punished her, having her in a negligee opening a door to sub zero temperatures and still being seductive, that is ACTING!

I don't know what I expected, as my last experience of filming was very much based on patchwork, multiple locations multiple days spread over months of filming. The pressure to get it right, to stay on schedule this time was immense, over running wasn't an option all night filming if necessary. We have to complete, there was no way it could be another week, everything was planned to the tiniest detail, writing week 1, pre production week 2, filming week 3, editing week 4, final edit and upload week 5. Maybe we have to apologise for being so pushy that people feel put out, but sometimes we have no option. The best thing about the day, was that nobody stepped out of line, everybody had a role and everybody stuck to their task.

Everybody appreciates good, hard work. When you're good, you're good and I find myself in a great position in that due to possibly more luck than anything else I can surround myself with people who are not only good, but great. Let's take for example my followers on Twitter, I needed faces for a fake social network site, and out of all the people I asked ( I will refrain from naming those who didn't respond) I had a majority yes from them all. It's frankly a weird world where someone you hardly know asks for your picture and you say yes.

I sometimes in these situations feel like a fake, a bit like that TV show whose name escapes me where someone pretends to be in a job they know nothing about. When the lovely Elinor Perry-Smith (Nun With A Gun Productions and co-producer of ForeverTogether) treated us to a lunch break I found myself surrounded by people with degrees and proper training, they've had their talents honed and developed to be the best they can be. Here was I , the untrained Northerner, somehow I'd gatecrashed a group of people with degrees and certificates and awards and yet I was an equal. It goes to prove one thing, if you have the talent then it comes to the surface. I had the priviledge of working with extremely talented people and they were just as complimentary to me as they were to each other. I still feel a fraud, but I'm not going to dwell on it because I'm a very good fraud.

Taking time to reflect on the day, I don't think it's an understatement to say that with another crew I wouldn't be as confident that we would have succeeded. I could put my faith in them and go there you are, location, actress, script. Do your thing. While I just faffed about in the background moving furniture and offering minor suggestions and collecting minor props that had slipped our mind.

[A test, anyone who can find the last minute prop that masqueraded as something else entirely will win a box of chocolate fingers]

So where do we go next? A very good question as the journey is far from over. We still need music, we still need an edit, we need to keep our fingers crossed that the thirty people we're thanking don't count towards our crew count. (I wouldn't have thought so) We need to upload it, we need to find tuxedo's, we need to discover if I and Danny Boyle have shared memories of the hills and dales of Bolton's countryside, we need to know how to get to the O2 arena to pick up our prize.... In terms of fantasies it's not a bad one. You have to try and you have to believe, as Teesha proved, if you try; you succeed. You cannot wipe the smile away from someone who has beaten the odds to be somewhere they only imagined. She may be one of a thousand dancers at the opening ceremony of the Olympic games, but she will have one of the biggest smiles.

So, here we go. Win Sundance, Adib and Adeel get their shot at a million dollar budget movie, Vanessa becomes lead role in Downton Abbey as Hugh Bonneville's long lost daughter, Scott gets to write the next Jason Statham action flick, Elinor is the most talked about new writer in the art movie world and I get a phone call from Toby Whithouse that says "I'm taking over Doctor Who.... let's talk."

We can dream.........