A
positive development that happened over the Christmas break was that I finally
began to get female applications for the role of Geraldine. This had become a problem by the end of
the first term because up to that point I had only received male
interest. After I put up a separate ad specifically looking for an
actress however, the applications started to roll in.
My
first individual role as a producer was to be the actor liaison. We decided to hold the auditions
between the 13th -15th of January in Coláiste Dhúlaigh and Coolock public
library and I sent each applicant an invitation email with a time slot. Out of the fifteen replies I received
back, five women and four men actually turned up to audition. This meant
we had an uneven gender balance but David filled in for the missing actor so
that the role-playing method could still go ahead.
We
decided not to audition for the role of Sean (the doctor) because we
figured it was a small and expositional part. Instead I advertised a
small speaking role online and we then choose an actor from the responses I
received based on whom we thought best suited the part as evidenced by their
show reel.
We
began production by shooting both the interior hospital scenes (1 &
3) on the ground floor of Coolock Civic Centre as had been arranged with
our contact. We had planned to
shoot both these scenes on the same day/evening if we could manage it, and I
had drafted a tight shooting schedule so as to have the best chance of
achieving this.
Although
we had fully set up the scene plenty of time in advance of shooting, we did
have a couple of set backs we feared might prevent us from covering as much as
we planned to. Firstly we were
only permitted to film in the Civic Centre after business hours (4pm onwards)
and secondly Rodrigo (our doctor) could not come until 6pm.
For
the set up we needed to arrange the area to look like a hospital waiting
room. For this we cleared out the
entire space and formed a row of chairs. I have a family member who is a
district nurse and she gave me a selection of medical posters that we put up on
the walls that were within shot to enhance the overall effect.
I
asked a friend of mine who works in a hospital if she could get me a set of
surgical scrubs for Rodrigo to wear in the scene. She managed to get a set, which was a great help because I
had priced them and they are expensive to buy. With all of this in place I was confident that we were going
to achieve the realistic hospital waiting room look we were aiming for.
We
had scheduled to shoot the two remaining scenes (2 & 4) in St Anne’s park,
Raheny on the Friday morning of our shooting week. I chose St Annes because I thought it would be an ideal
location. I know the park well and
knew that it’s almost always very quiet during weekdays. As we are not in college on Fridays,
this also meant we could have the advantage of full morning, afternoon and
early evening light to shoot in.
So
the plan was to get all of our main shots filmed on the Friday and then we
would still have Saturday and Sunday to film cutaway shots.
I
had been vigilantly checking the weather forecast for the week and alas, it
ended up being a very bad week to film outdoors. The forecast was for continuous rain from Monday through to
Saturday and it was predicted to get even heavier and remain for longer periods
as the week progressed.
The
weather was due to get better on the Sunday and so we were forced to reschedule
until then. This would mean that
we would need to start shooting early in the morning and finish as soon as
possible in order to beat the hordes of weekend park visitors.
A
vital prop that we still needed was the memorial plaque for the bench. In preproduction we had considered the
idea of finding a bench that had a plaque and then trying to alter its typeface
for our purposes using after effects software. In the end I decided against this idea reckoning it could be
too tricky to work well and therefore risky to leave as late as postproduction.
So
we decided it was best to buy a memorial plaque that we could attach to a bench
ourselves and get in engraved with the text form the script. I took it upon myself to get this
sorted as soon as possible because time was becoming precious.
I
had no luck finding a plaque sales/engraving service online and so after a long
search in the city centre on foot, I eventually found a place that could help
me. As it turns out, plaque
engraving is very expensive (just under €100) but I discovered I could get a
cheaper thin metal plaque with black printed text for half the cost.
By
this point everything was in place and all we needed now was for the weather
forecast to stay unchanged for Sunday and for things to run smoothly enough so
we could get the full shoot completed in one day.
David
and I met Hugh, Rosemary and Jim (our sound man) at the park at 8.30am on the
Sunday morning and we all had a quick talk through the day’s shoot. The weather had not let us down and the
light was perfect which I was particularly pleased about. Our schedule went
according to plan and by approximately 12.30pm we had everything shot.
