Major Production- Film Festivals

As to build the budget with all the appropriate aspects it lead me to research where we may be able to submit the film. This is in terms of film festivals, in order to get the price for which film festivals we had to look on websites that would have them as a data base. This lead me to the website in which Lex and Mike are already members, Withoutabox, from this website I was able to find film Festivals that have the criteria that we would be able to enter with a price.

Such as the New Renaissance Film Festival: New Renaissance Film

We fit for their criteria in the category- Narrative UK Short Film, the entry date is May and the fee is £30 on this site. 

The next festival I looked at was the UK Film Festival:UK Film Festival

Grit fits into the category of Short Film, entry from May to October, at the cost of £25.

London Independent Film Festival- London Independent Film

Category short, entry being a shorter amount of time meaning we would most likely have to put the film in next year at a fee of £50.

London International Short Film Festival- London International Short Film

Under the category of the UK Graduation Short, with the entry being until August this would be a good festival for Grit to enter. This would cost £25 regular. 

I have noted these festivals that and have kept notes of the entry fee for after the course hand in. 

Major Project- Budget Document

For the budget document, the beginning of the production I noted down on paper. This was organised but not the best way to store the information, this lead to research on how other productions create their budgets.
These budget documents show how others have organised the information within and excel.

From looking at these documents I have decided to create an excel document. 

From Making the Movie website I have found a budget document that can help to make sure I fill in all of the parts that any other film would have.

This is our current budget, as the bottom line shows we are over budget meaning we need to put more money in.

Major Project- Social Media

For the film we decided to make a Facebook page in which the whole group can edit and add to. For this I have made sure that the cast know of the page as we wanted to make sure that we could put their image onto the page with their permission.

The photo's that were chosen for the site were from the Casting Call Pages as all of the cast had agreed but I also showed them the page before the post was published. 

We have currently received 113 likes on Facebook, the largest post reached people has a count of 521.

By using social media we can build a hype around the production and receive support from people who see the page. The actors have appreciated the Facebook page as they can show people who are interested in what they are currently working on. 

Major Project- Locations

To make sure that we had the locations that fit the script I needed to go through the script and write down how many locations we would need, the criteria for the locations e.g tree stump, bench. This lead to scouting locations or looking at the pre-production book and making sure that not only did we get the locations already scouted but that we got new locations that were added to the script.

For permission for the locations I had to contact Kent Film Office and fill in a few of their forms in which I found that we have a lot of dates and locations to plan for.

This was the first application for locations, this then grew due to changes in the script. There is only one issue that is currently being handled due to the lack of information about Barming Woods. Therefore the Barming Woods scenes have now been filmed at Quarry Woods. Quarry Woods was obtained by contacting Kent Wildlife directly instead of contacting Kent Film Office.

We are currently still hoping for permission for Barming Woods as we would like one of the locations this has lead me to contact Barming Parish Council. We would like to film in the highlighted square, this has been sent to the parish council in hope that they know who owns the land. 

Update from Barming Council, they were able to find the owner of the land and sent me the contact information for the agent that handles these types of enquiries, I have contacted him and he has said that he will talk the request over with the land owner. We were not able to secure Barming Woods but we did find some where else called Holborough Woods, Kent Wild Life, were able to show us some images and where it was. By contacting Ray Lewis we were able to get the permission, although we couldn't scout the location and just had to turn up on the day, from google images we were able to see if the area had the criteria that we needed. 

While looking at the images and the Kent Wild Life website we could see there was a large area that fit the criteria needed in the script. 

Major Project-Casting

Casting for Grit was achieved via team work, within the production Lex knows his characters and therefore I thought that I would make sure he would know who I have auditioning for what role. With this Lex was there for all auditions and received all the audition tapes that came in.

We put up the adverts on Casting Call Pro and Star Now, these adverts mentioned the character traits the film and what dates would be required from the cast. We received many applicants for each role, Casting Call Pro had 24 applicants and Star Now had 15. From these application we had to narrow down to the people that not only looked like the characters but also people who we thought would be interested in a student role.

From these people we asked if they would like to come in and audition or send us an audition video. We received these over a period of time in which I also talked to the applicants about how we could get them on board (pay, travel and food). The two main roles were offered more than those that would only be needed for a few days, such roles as Archie and Sean would require the actor to be available a lot longer than those actor who is paying the role of Perry.

We encountered issues with a lot of the actors as we were not offering them enough money, this was at least 60% of our applicants decided we were not offering them enough and decided to not be part of the project. Other issues were encountered when the dates were further discussed, some of the actors could commit to some days but not all, this could not be worked out in the schedule, this meant we had to part ways with these actors. From this we had a very small number of applicants, this lead to Lex and I searching on the sites for actors that fit our criteria, from this we got more audition tapes and had more of a choice of people that we had already picked. Some of the people auditioned for one role but then was chosen for a different role, at first we were concerned that they would pull out of the project as they would not want the other role but thankfully all the actors were happy with given roles.

Once we had chosen our actors, terms were agreed and contracts were signed we went a head and sent them the current script. The feedback from the actors lead us to believe they were right from the roles, each of them engaged with the script and found that they loved the characters they were cast as.

Our cast is as follows:

Jennie Hillard as Zoe

Daniel Shelley as Perry

Zed Josef as Sean 

James Percy Smith as Archie 

These cast members were happy with the dates and if not they were negotiated, each person has signed and sent the contract back to me. They are all excited for filming and we are excited to work with them. 

Major Project- Crew

Grit has a long shooting schedule in which we need to make sure we are crewed for. This means making sure that on every shoot day there is sound, runners and a camera assistant. But due to the length of the project and all of the crew being that of students we need to make sure that the crew are not missing out on their own work. In order to do this we looked at the time tables of each of the students with them and made sure that they were not missing anything and were not taking to much time out of their own work.

Each crew member was hand picked by myself and Lex, we went through current work of the crew members and their blogs to see if they were up to date with their work. From this I then had a chat with each of them about how they would feel about committing to around 5 days to our project. From this we also offered help on their projects as to make up for time they may have lost. In the case of Wesley and Jordan, I offered to be a stand-in for their studio production, this would help them to practise what is needed for the actual production.

Not only did we have members from our own course but I decided to get in touch with some photography students as to get an on set photographer.
I contacted the photography course at the University for the Creative Arts.

Dear Heike Lowenstein,

I am student from Television Production and was hoping you would be able to put out an advert to your students asking if they would like to come with us on our major project and take some stills for us. I am happy to provide project details to those who are interested. If any students are interested please have them contact me on rmeats@students.ucreative.ac.uk 

Thank you 

Roxanne Meats 

As well as the Mid Kent Collage course,

Hello, 

I am student from Television Production, University for the Creative Arts, and was hoping you would be able to put out an advert to your photography students asking if they would like to come with us on our major project and take some stills for us. I am happy to provide project details to those who are interested. If any students are interested please have them contact me on rmeats@students.ucreative.ac.uk 

Thank you 

Roxanne Meats 

This unfortunately didn't get me any responses, so after 2 days I decided to go onto the Facebook group for UCA freshers and see if there were any students that would be free, this direct approach gave me three photographers to contact.

From this I talked to three people but best liked the work of Alex Robert, his work is on Flickr, this gave me a chance to look at the work he had done and to offer him a way to expand his portfolio.

Major Project- Schedule

For Grit a filming schedule needed to be made and kept up to date. For this we created the schedule on a online calendar, Asana website was able to create a calendar that we could all edit and see live.

Each day on the calendar had a running order, cast and crew attendance. This made call sheets easy to create and running orders up to date.

The running order was decided by a conversation between Lex, Mike and myself. Lex and Mike were able to tell me how much time they needed for each scene as they had planned their shots already. The running oder needed to be changed on some days as actor availability sometimes as they had other commitments.