Blog: Guerilla Filmmaking

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When I met with Mr J Dredge for our usual weekly MEET on Wednesday we talked about entering the Raindance Festival 16 second short film competition. It's pretty much what it says it is and, as the closing date for the competition is next Friday, we thought we should a) come up with an idea and b) film it soon!

THUS it was just over 24 hours later that we gathered at St Pancras to MAKE MOVIES. I'd looked online before heading out and noticed that you're not technically meant to film at St Pancras, but thought it'd probably be OK - there weren't any safety issues and we wouldn't need to stop anybody doing anything, so we crossed fingers, pushed ideas of being ARRESTED out of our minds, and DID it.

The script called for several shots of the big CLOCK, ten minutes apart each time, so there was quite a lot of going back and forth to film that. It also called for FLOWERS so we nipped into M&S and bought 2 bunches of the above, thus blowing most of the budget in one fell swoop. The story's about two blokes being stood up on a date, so we thought it might be good to film it at the huge "chocolate figures" statue, but worried that someone might see us and tell us off. Luckily it turns out that if you go round the BACK of the statue there's plenty of room and you're hidden from view too, but it was still a mildly nervy 5 minutes of filming as we did several takes of the main scene.

After that we did a quick bit in the John Betjeman pub (who were tremendously blase about it) and another just round the corner, and it was DONE - an entire film finished in less than an hour! Well, I hoped it was - my new camera is still very new and I wasn't sure how to check you'd actually filmed correctly (SPOILERS: I had) but there was no time for that anyway, as I had another appointment to get to - Totally Acoustic!

posted 6/2/2015 by MJ Hibbett

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SPAMBOT FILTER: an animal that says 'buzz' (3)
	(e.g. for an animal that says 'cluck' type 'hen')