Shooting 'The Golden Rule'

The Golden Rule, or An Riaghailt Or, is my Gaelic short film for FilmG. The Friday evening shoot went rather swimmingly and was most enjoyable and Saturday – a full day shooting in Mugdock Park – was in fact a great day. As I got up at 5am my main worries were firstly that the weather would not hold out and we would be rained off and secondly that the light would run out and we wouldn’t get everything shot. As it turned out I should have been more worried about battery power! Just over halfway through our schedule the batteries began to empty and by the end of the day we were reduced to using ‘bits of batteries’ and – wait for it – holding the batteries under our armpits to try and get a final burst of power from them; Gavin’s brainwave, and it worked! So by that point our ‘professional practise’ had maybe gone out the window a tiny bit but overall I was enormously impressed by the way we worked together as a film crew. I could sense huge improvements in communication and focus even just since working on Little Clown. Harmonious collaboration is perhaps one of the most beautiful things the human race is capable of, and it gets results. One of the extras, a scarily exercise-mad woman kind enough to act as a ‘cross-country runner’, commented on how professional we were and that was perhaps the most uplifting part of the whole shoot. I was very pleasantly surprised that we got just about everything shot that we set out to get even if two scenes were rushed quite shockingly. But I should have known it was too good to be true...

First thing on Monday morning I got the footage to Ally (the editor) who started digitising immediately. That afternoon we discovered that most of what we shot on Saturday afternoon had not recorded properly (dirty heads or something) and was unusable. An entire scene, almost two, was missing from our media. After considering some depressing compromises we finally decided to go for the headache of a reshoot at the coming weekend. Although this is more than just a slight nuisance it is, in my opinion almost a blessing in disguise. Neither Paul or I were particularly happy with the footage we had recorded that afternoon because it had been so rushed and of course we want the film to be the best it can be. So... here’s hoping for Saturday!