Back Filming the Elm for Halloween

Welcome Acting Fans, fellow bloggers and people of the worlds' Internet, it is Friday - once again a my turn to ramble on, so ramblers lets get rambling.... What have we been doing. Well we haven't been into the woods but we've been around some trees...

Pretty sure there's an Elm in there somewhere but trees aren't my strong point. Dammit, Jim, I'm a Filmmaker, not a Tree Doctor!

Well as said in Wednesday's Blog we were going to be filming again and, yep, fortune was with us this time we once more got behind and in front of the camera. We did it on Thursday now at first we were just going to do the INTerior shots of the Halloween special but, as the day turned out be so nice, clear and dry day, we thought why not get some of the EXTerior shots too. At first we were just going to do one of them which involved an old character popping up from previous special, plus it was also going to be a test for a deliberately lower-tech camera to see if the effect it would give was going to work.

And it worked very well indeed thanks to the older digital camera Chris had bought way back in the early Noughties. The jittery movement of the video on the camera gave the exact effect that we were after. After all, if you can do it camera it always better, cheaper and easy in the edit, so with this test  shot being so much better than we thought, and only being able to film 6 min on this old camera, we decided it would be best to gun it and get the rest of other sequences we were going to use it on done too. Especially as we had the day, the light and the nice weather.

So with both of us out there taking turns to film different sequences using both the the old camera and our trusty Lumix, we got all of the EXTeriors done and in record time, as some of them were just one takes. (Yep, we are really getting that much better). Besides one battery crash (Chris had warned me about the OG DC's battery life) that left us briefly powerless and meant I had to walk back to H&H HQ to get the spare batteries (luckily we had plenty, we just didn't bring them all out with us, d'oh!) it all went well. Then it was on to actual H&H stuff, in-character and everything, as that was all INTerior and we decide to go mainly with a static two shot partly for speed and partly for contrasting atmosphere with the more , let's say, 'lively' EXTeriors. Though this meant just going through some main scenes in single takes without any cutaways so we needed lines bang on. Which, after a slow start and a few small fluffs, we did eventually get them down and in the can.

Once that was done along with some clever reversal shots, making sure lighting would match up as we had filmed one half of them much earlier before we went on out extended EXTerior shoot, it was on to the last two POV shots and the endcap scene with H&H (yes, that's us). That was the real easiest one an, once again I got to eat a prop, always the best props are edible I find, but in true H&H style, just as we were getting ready to finish for the day, we remembered a short sequence we hadn't done! Once again Chris donned his outfit to do this last scene which is, well, it was just as important as any other scene and more importantly would have harder to re-shoot at a later date. Finally with everything done in and around H&H HQ. It was a wrap now, all we have left to do is the end of which I can tell you NOTHING about....mwhahahahah!!!

Well that's all for now folks see you in the future.

TTFN

Vernon Harcourt