Right now, I’m sat in the sun in Majorca. It’s 32 degrees and I’m contemplating another dip in the pool. I’m on holiday with the family. It’s beautiful…perfect weather, beautiful villa in the mountains and lots of amazing food. It's great to spend some time with the family and try to relax for once. (i'm not good at that) However…while enduring this paradise, I’m also trying to plan a feature film shoot that kicks off on the 7
th September…and between now and the shoot I’ve also got a trip to Sweden and Las Vegas for a couple of gigs with Howard Jones.
The feature we’re shooting is now fully funded and we’ve also got all the cast and crew booked. It’s going to be a full-on shoot…we’ve got over 70 scenes to shoot in just over 2 weeks worth of on-set time. That’s a lot. What makes it more grueling is that we’re shooting nights… we need darkness for the whole shoot, so we’re starting once it gets dark and working through the night. It’s a big ask of the both cast and crew.
I’m really lucky to have a great bunch of people working on this with me who are making sure it runs as smoothly as possible. The Recoil Films team are working over-time to get this production ready to shoot and some very good friends are going above and beyond to help also. My good friend and fellow tour-mate Ian Holmes who takes care of lights and video projections with Kim Wilde is running the lighting side of things as well as looking after the generator and general power issues. He’s got a great deal of experience with film lighting and special FX (of the in-camera variety), so he’s going to be vital in getting the look of ‘The Addicted’ spot on. He’s also managed to find a lot of the props we need.
We’re really chuffed to have found Natalie Cherrett from the Davina Make-Up Academy to deal with our make-up for the shoot. She comes highly recommended and we’re looking forward to working with her.
Jonathan Atkinson is our Production Sound Mixer and Composer and Jenny Gayner is Co-Producing along with myself.
I’ll do a blog on the cast nearer the time… but I will say we’ve been incredibly lucky to get such a talented bunch of people for this feature. Thea Knight who was involved in the ‘proof of concept’ trailer for ‘Their Law’ and Dan Peters from ‘Shoot The DJ’ are both in big roles…as is Paul Cooper, Jenny Gayner and myself. We’ve also managed to get Simon Naylor, Tim Parker, John Cusworth, Brooke Burfitt, Samantha Spurgin, Charlie Cameron, Jos Slovick and Paul Giles.
In an arse-about-face way…we’ve finally got the shooting script ready. This project came about so fast, that we actually had the location before we had the script. It’s not the usual way of working… but I had a rough story outline in my head…but I couldn’t write it properly until I had the exact layout of the building. So…we got the location secured first… then we found most of the cast… then I could write the script. It sounds completely backwards… but it’s the only way we could make it work. It was also nice to know who was playing who before I finished the writing stage as I could write to their strengths. It’s been a tricky script in many was as there’s so much action in this film… there is plenty of dialogue, but sometimes there’s very little for a few pages.
All that’s left to do now is buy the equipment we need….rent the other bits, and get stuck into the final stages of pre-production. We’ve got a full cast read-through and a meet’n’greet for everyone to meet each other… then it’s mostly technical stuff like testing the props… modifying my dolly to work on the location we’re in and testing the camera rig.
If there’s any film students or interested people in the Hertfordshire area who would like to be involved… get in touch. There’s always room for an extra pair of hands.