My shoot for my Directions Unit six minute piece was more successful than my first attempt at organising a shoot, however not everything went to plan. To begin with, I had managed to obtain 6 Actors through facebook acting groups/ acting agencies and another 4 that were friends, however they would be required at different times for different roles as they were in different scenes. With this in mind I decided to use the contracted agency actors first so that i didn't accidentally break the legal contract by changing shoot times etc.
I decided to cast relatively young looking men for the suspect roles and older men for the two main interrogators so that symbolically it would be like young vs old, good vs bad, polar opposites. I also chose to cast my characters differently to Love's when looking at the character "George". In the film he is a young man, early to mid 20's. However i wanted both George and Jack to look of similar age so that if someone was to read between the lines, they may think that the two characters go back a long time, sort of brotherly bond as partners not an apprentice and his master style of relationship.
Another change I made was with costume, all of the interrogators are wearing suits and ties apart from Jack. I wanted this to imply that his attire reflects his messy and disorganised life as well as his manor of conduct. Also something to note is that no other interrogators swear apart from the "bad guys" and Jack. Perhaps this could reflect on his morality and shady back hand dealings you would see later in the film? Regardless of their morals though I kept the same tense underscore of music playing throughout every characters scene as to maintain the tension.
I arranged to pick crew and actors up myself and due to traffic, instead of starting at 4 we were starting at just after 5. This didn't matter too much though as all the equipment had been set up from 3:30 onwards. The first scene went quite well, the lighting was quickly agreed on and the actors (one of which was my friend as i thought he suited the role very well) knew thier lines and performed them well. After about an hour I offered for the cast to have a break for a smoke etc and they obliged, then we re-convened after about 15 mins and continued with filming. Not long after we wrapped that scene and prepared the actors that were in the next scene. they all had their costumes on and the props had been put in place, but it became clear the actor playing the main suspect hadn't learnt his lines. This caused extremely long delays as we had to keep stopping the recording as he stumbled over his lines. Instead of it taking and hour to an hour and a half it took us until 9:30 pm. Of course being a director you could not just yell at the actor for getting his lines wrong, you had to comfort and encourage him in the hopes that after repeating his lines several times he will start to remember them.
I only had 200 pounds to pay for actors services, their travel and their food. I also had to consider petrol money to taxi them to and from the trains stations to location. I also was slightly playing with fire as all of the actors were on different amounts of pay (my friends were on nothing) so if i wanted them to stay my friends then i politely and privately asked all the actors individually not to mention pay as some people are doing it for free. Thankfully this did work however it came quite close when some of the actors were starting to ask about when they get paid so i just quickly and quietly told them that i would speak to them in a second in private. All in all i stayed within budget and obtained usable footage so I feel pleased with the overall experience.
