What a amazing experience…no not the filming of Ashley Taggart’s neatly put together script “Lo,” but the feeling of sheer delight when on a Monday morning you wake up to the sound of birds singing and the cattle mooing (I live in the countryside) instead of the incessant repetition of the Nokia theme from my mobile’s wake up alarm. When you realise that no one is on Warm Up this morning and we won’t have to go through 15mins of torturous stretches mixed with samplings of classmates favourite compilation of African drum music. (I should note though that these are student Warm Ups.)
It’s 11 o’clock on Monday morning and I am walking leisurely from Heuston station to The Digital Hub on Crane street in the City of Dublin. We’re setting up for our Film and TV project which will began filming last Tuesday. I remember thinking to myself that this will be a short and easy day of tech and all those things that go along with set up…nothing to it. I was wrong. We started at 11.30am and I barely made the 20.05pm train. Although long, the day was completely fantastic and a new experience. I had worked on films before but never any with a set up as organised as this. When we left everything was set up, we were ready to go with filming but there was only one problem, tomorrow wasn’t my day to film, I was going to be crew for the day.
It turned out that being crew wasn’t such a bad thing and I even became 1st Assistant Director, to the Director, Barrie Dowdall - I was climbing the ladder fast! We started filming at 10.30 and didn’t finish again till near 8, but it was ok because we had one film in the can. We wrapped and I went home to prepare for my filming debut tomorrow.
Today we started at 9 and filmed until 9.15pm. It was tough because we were filming two groups and what I noticed while trying to stay in character on set is that after a while of not being on, things begin to distract you. It becomes very easy to be seduced into messing around or talking to people but the key is to stay focused…and I know this sounds antisocial, but stay away from the people you know will distract even if they don’t do it intentionally! I had a great time filming and I think the best lesson I went away with was the power and strength of calmness in front of the camera.
Shakespeare next week…
Simon Stewart (2nd Year Full-Time Student)
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