Most of this post is likely to be a rehash of this one from August. That pretty much outlines most of the lessons I learnt while filming Fairy Tale. But I thought I’d add a little more.

There were two maxims I kept in mind when planning the shoot:-
1. It’s only 60 seconds long and I am not Kubrick therefore it shouldn’t cost a lot and it should remain fun.
2. Even thought it’s only 60 seconds long, the shoot should still be run properly and “professionally”.

By professionally, I mean that there were storyboards, a shot list, setups, clapperboard and that it ran like a proper shoot. I remember thinking at the time that perhaps that was overkill but we were making a film so why should we expect anything less than a proper approach to filmmaking.

Admittedly, we cut some corners - as we didn’t have a seperate sound unit and were using in camera audio, the clapperboard was actually a small white board. But the point was that we did log each shot and we did slate each shot. It certainly helped when editing it.

It still all went to the dogs after a boozy lunch.

As discussed in the original post, I learnt a lot doing this shoot. That’s one of the major benefits of doing a microshort - you don’t have a lot to fuck up on. For my next one I’m going to make sure I have a hell of a lot more shots to cover eventualities. The biggest problem with the whole shoot was sticking to the plan and not being flexible. I knew that the zoom in on the family photo wasn’t working but I didn’t cover myself by trying it in a different way. I could have tried tracking in. I could have tried different angles and close ups. I hope I’ll know better next time.

(I don’t know if this post was at all necessary but as I started with a Pt 1, I figured I might as well add a Pt 2!)