Production Diary for "The Board"

Production Diary for "The Board" - Page 1

Author:	Wish Craft
Date:	Thu, 20/04/2006 - 22:55
Category:	Filmmaking > Production

The Board

Production Diary - Introduction

Thursday 20th April 2006

By Wish Craft – Writer/Producer/Director

Hi everybody,

I was asked by the good people here at UKFilm.org to write a production diary of the upcoming movie – The Board.

We go into production between May 15th - 27th, and you will be getting a daily update on how things are going. I thought that it would be far more interesting to hear from all four producers, as we also all have other roles within the film, and this would give you a much more thorough picture of how things are going and, hopefully, this diary will be of much more use to you on your own productions.

If nothing else, then what I have to say will back up what I have always said: if you don’t ask you don’t get. Put simply, if you want something, then ask for it. If you are told no, you are no worse off than you were beforehand, but you may be told yes.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, I’ve written since I learnt to read, at the late age of seven, and have always dreamt of doing it full time and I’ve also always wanted to make movies.

One night, about a month ago, I was sitting down with my partner, Sylv, watching Camp Blood, a cheaply made American slasher movie. I won’t say too much about it as a low budget obviously can’t meet with the usual standards, but you can read what others have said at imdb. We felt that if it could get distributed and even cause a sequel, then we could do just as well, if not better. So, we sat down that night until about 3am and wrote down a general storyline for a UK-based slasher, on the back of an envelope.

We decided that we would make the film with friends and locals doing the acting and sell the DVD’s locally to raise some cash for the local children’s cancer ward. We started this off and then something strange happened.

I placed some info onto IMDB about the horror film and said that we were looking for actors, not expecting anybody to come forward as it had a zero budget, so nobody could get paid or even have their expenses met. However, we did get a response and from all over the world. So we now have actors in the film from all over the UK, Denmark and the USA. Real actors who can act!

Following some problems, including accidentally formatting my hard drive with the script and backup still on there, the laptop dying on me and various other little quirks, we finally had ourselves a little production meeting to see where we were and what we would do next. This went quite well, though there was a certain case of people trying to take over at certain points.

I brought Simon and Elana on board, they had been a year above me on my Media (Moving Image) college course, a course which taught me all the rules of film making that I then broke, and two people who are very creative but think in the same way as we do. Simon is now producer/director of photography and Elana is producer/creative consultant, plus there to help where she can, particularly in sorting everybody out, giving me the chance to direct and not be so hassled.

Earlier this week, we took a look at some locations in Southampton for filming and I’ve included some of these photos for you, to get an idea of how it will look.

We have another production meeting on Saturday and we’ll have a much better idea of how things are going at that time, so I’ll let you all know how things go.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has contacted us regarding the film, especially those who are in the cast and crew. They are paying their own way to make this film, and the children at the Piam Brown children’s cancer ward will benefit from this in a big way.