Major Project - Image Edit

Because Love Always was set during the 1940s I sat down with Sam Creamer to try and digitally remove some of the elements that broke this appearance.

I hope that the audience doesn't notice the changes, I hope that they just assume that is how the image looked in camera.

Note the aerials have been removed, one of many corrections.

Major Project - ADR

Because of the m20 being located near the Museum of Kent Life which was our main location there are    areas of dialog that the traffic noise was to much to filter out during the post production process. Because of this I contacted my actors and had them return to Maidstone where we recorded their lines again where the audio was unusable.

This was a fairly simple process and worked very effectivly with the audio in the film now being of a good quality.

Because of the ease that this process took looking back on the ADR process I think it would have been a good idea to have had the actors redo all of their lines which would have given me more options in the edit.

However for the most part I think that the mix of location dialog and ADR works well and is often unnoticeable.

Major Project - The Edit

Due to the editor being unable to produce an edit that Hennie and I decided that the best move was to let him go and I took over. This has proved the most effective solution as the changes and tweaks have been made quickly and the entire post production process has been sped up because of it.

Love Always Trailer

Major Project - Production Day 4

I was glad that between day one and two we had contacted the cast and crew to arrange an extra days filming. Without that extra day we simply wouldn't have been able to shoot everything we needed to have a complete film.

During day four we got some of the most amazing performances from our actors. A scene that I was particularly amazed with the performance of was the scene pictured below. Tara turned from her happy self to a heartbroken and desperate figure. She was the only one acting in the scene and managed to reduce some of the members of the crew to tears. That's powerful stuff.

As we continued to film the remaining scenes one by one we rapped our actors. It was a pleasure to work with each of them. The day ended just as the light was fading out of the day and we filmed our last couple of scenes right down to the wire. I have a lot of faith in Sam Creamer the DP on the short but it is still nerve racking waiting to see what the we got. 

Major Project - Production Day 3

After a well earned nights sleep the full cast and crew reconvened at the Museum of Kent Life rearing and ready to go for day three of filming. It was on this day that we as a production broke rule number one of film making "Don't work with children or animals".

The day fell into two halves, the first half was a joy to work during as Louie the young boy who we had playing Johnny was happy and raring to act. We shot several scenes with him in them and he gave a very good performance for a four year old with no previous experience on camera.   

It was also during day three that Ollie Matjasz was well enough to take up his role as Arthur. The relationships between the three characters shown above came across as very genuine and warm. As we had been going slower than needed on the previous days shootings the decision was made that we would have to use two cameras to get the coverage in a quicker fashion than we had been doing. This would also help with not making Louie do as many repetitions of scenes which would have brought his to his stopping point with even less of his scenes having been shot.

The second half of the day came when Louie had simply had enough. It was totally understandable a four year old boy can only do so much without it becoming to much. This did however mean that there were a number of scenes scheduled to be filmed that couldn't be filmed as written in the script. It was fortunate that Maddie Ireland on of the writers of the short was on hand to help Producer Hennie and Director Daniel work quick revisions to those scenes so that they still made sense without Johnny being present. Although this isn't what we had hoped to be filming it meant that the film could head towards completion.

The scene that took the longest to shoot on day three was the scene of Arthur coming home. Although this was the case the time spent we hope should be well worth it. It is the only scene of the short where all four of the main cast are in it together. Due to using a two camera setup during this second day of filming we were able to catch up to where we were scheduled to be. The main concern after filming on day three was the audio quality that we were able to obtain. On day two the audio equipment was the personally own equipment of Michael Birrin. For days three and four the sound operator Robert Copland had to use far less quality equipment. He reviealed that the wind shield we had wasn't very effective and therefore it is likely that we will have wind noise issues in the post production process.

Major Project - Production Day 2

There was a two week break between day one and two of filming for Love Always and this gave me ample opportunity to look back over the footage we shot, see what I liked about camera work and the actors performances and see if there were things that we would need to address for the remaining days of filming. Thankfully there wasn't a huge amount of what we got from day one that would have changed it I had chance to do it over.

So on the morning of day two the cast and crew arrived at the Museum of Kent Life which would serve as our location for a majority of the next three days of filming. It had been pre arranged that we could use their buildings as our sets what came as a nice surprise was that they also provided us with a large warm base room where we could put our equipment the hair, makeup and wardrobe members of the crew were able to set up and  stay in relative comfort rather than set up outside in the cool October air.  

For day two of production we had a largely extended cast and crew some returning members and some new additions. Re-joining us from day one was Benedict Smith who played Frank. We had planned to start the day doing some of the scenes that only required him, knowing from the first days filming that hair and makeup for Tara Dowd who played Mary would take at least an hour. We started our day off well and any nerves I have were soon lost to what we were doing. As the day went on I was happy with the performances that Benedict, Tara and Eliza Jade who played Alice gave. Although we had had scenes scheduled with the character of Arthur for the second day due to illness
he was unable to attend. This worked out for the best of the production in the end as although what we were getting was good it did take longer to  get than I had expected and probably wouldn't have had time to film his scenes anyway.