Musings of an Idiot

Day-8 of 'Five'

Man, what a week it has been and to top it off what a weekend it has been. We went back into the bush for filming again. The idea was to do a couple of pickup scenes on Saturday and then film the climax of the movie on Sunday as it would take up most of the day but the weather had entirely different ideas. It had been raining cats and dogs through out the week leading upto the weekend and the weather forecast for the weekend said that it was going to rain through the weekend with thunder on Saturday and heavy showers on Sunday.

Since we had already booked the location and equipment and organized everything else for the shoot - there was no backing down and we decided to go for it. We left Saturday afternoon but it was still heavily overcast and raining non-stop since Friday night and when we stopped at Arataki Visitor Centre to pick up our film permits and hut stay permit it wasn't looking particularly good for the shoot. You can see what I mean by that by looking at the couple of photographs down below.



So I was definitely a bit worried about the entire shoot coming to nothing. I decided to cancel the pickup shots we needed in the car as they wouldn't have matched up with the rest of the scene and decided to tramp into the hut, so we could save up our energies for the following day. The tramp in was fun - there were a couple of places where Benji, Lance and me were trying to outrun each other on the slippery and muddy track. The eventful thing of the trip was Benji slipping and falling into a small side trench. Lance and me went to pick him up but he just felt so comfortable there that he wanted to lie there for a bit. After a really short break we started walking again and reached the hut without any further incidents.

The hut itself was a big surprise this time - it was super clean and there was no smell of rat droppings or any rats to be seen. Someone must have come and cleaned the hut up and put some rat poison around and killed them. The cast sat down and took the evening to go through the script and iron it out a bit more, so we didn't spend as much time on it the next day. This time we had an extra crew member in the form of Jonathan Drew, who was helping out as a cam assist - as we had a glidecam with us on the shoot. Poor guy - he had no idea about the snorers in the group - heeheee....

I was praying right until I fell asleep that the weather Gods would be kind to us and that we would have a good day on Sunday. And the prayers were answered as we had the perfect day for filming. It was a bit misty in the morning but by the time we started filming it became a gorgeous and sunny day.

The day was intense and long. There were a few moments of tension here and there but still it turned out to be heaps of fun. And the performances as well as the footage looks fantastic, so I am really excited about going into post with that footage. Since we were filming at such an intense rate - none of us really had any time to take any production photos but we've got some excellent 'behind the scenes' footage though - thanks to Mike.

Labels: Five

posted by Amit @ 8:55 AM