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Posted: 2020-05-29 12:00:00

29/05/2020

29th May

Today we finish our rehearsals and are praying that costumes, props, guns and technology all arrive in time. The clock is ticking....

After days of frantic thinking and some worried moments when we thought it maybe couldn’t be done at all, yesterday we finally got confirmation that our method of filming Birdsong is going to work. Above shows a picture of Tim who plays Firebrace in the production. He has rigged up a green screen using gaffer tape (and breaking no less than 3 glasses along the way) and then manipulated his phone and computer into alignment so that we could record a scene simultaneously on both Zoom and locally on his iPhone.

The iPhone then uploads to a special cloud filing system from where editor Tristan then take the video looking like the picture on the right and adds our backgrounds to turn it into something looking like the picture on the left.

 It’s 8:28am as I write this and we start filming properly at 10:30am where we have Max and Tim T working on some of the early scenes. Yesterday was spent getting all things prepared for this. James drove period weapons around the country, Green screens were tracked and traced with the last one arriving before 8pm and costume fittings all done as people worked well into the evening.

Charlotte has been juggling the conflicting availabilities of all the actors and has put together a tight plotted schedule which includes deadlines for Max who is back in Eastenders soon and needs his beard regrown by a certain point. Others have family or work commitments and we have an end deadline of mid-June to complete everything. All of that means we have a very limited window of time to get this all done. So we hope yesterdays technical sessions pay dividends.

I was certainly pleased, relieved and potentially excited to see our grand plan coming to the good today. Stage One is now done....we move now to Stage Two.....