Firstly i have recently discovered pearls before swine (www.comics.com) it is one of the funniest things i have come across. Just got the book through the post as well and it had me in stitches.

having a very much well chuffed week so far and its only wednesday!!

Firstly long over due clean up of the site at www.5ylac.s5.com , (ok it is short and sweet but you should of seen what was there previously!) and if you load up the site, you see at the bottom of the page the word "Dead" highlighted, move over your mouse and you'll see a spotlight revealing the translation of Mortus Illumina, that is the first thing im well chuffed about this week.

Secondly in the big Jake Guzik's accountancy book for Mortus Illumina, there is something in the income column!! a whopping 45p (76c) !!!!! which has been made by the selling of photographs on the fotki site for MI. The final cost of the film project is looking to be around £40'000 so that means we need to only make 39'995.55 and were in profit!!!! that yaught in the south of france is looking closer than ever ;-)

And finally This is the first "proper" (been playing the getaway a lot so maybe that should be prounced prau-per)entry into this Journal!!!!

Last night at the White Horse pub off of Carnaby street. there was a meeting with the cinematography team for MI, Before going into detail about the meeting i think the White Horse deserves a mention in this journal

Way back in september 1999 was when the very first ever 5YLAC meeting took place.(see photos the begining) How 5YLAC started is another story all together which ill save for another entry in this journal but to give a brief summary, I started 5YLAC from basically a series of postings on message boards and going through yahoo profiles e-mailing people who had a interest in film. The project i had in mind at the time was In the Key of A (one thing in life you could do again what would it be ? ) a low budget feature about a band coming down from manchester to london where they meet a fatal end. (this project is on the shelf at the moment as i dont feel the time is right to go back to 1994 which is when the film is set) The very first people i met for the film, i met in the White Horse pub. And from then on it became officiallly the main base of operations for 5YLAC. Deadlights was planned and executed from there, all the early 5YLAC and ITKOA meetings were there and the early and smaller meetings for Mortus Illumina have taken place and taking place there. If i need to meet someone anything film related then that is usuall the first place i suggest.

It does however have a downside, that is it is a small pub if im meeting any more than id say 12 people then the next port of call in 5YLAC operation rooms is All Bar One on Dean st. (where we will be on saturday as we have a general meeting there. first time i would of been there for over a year!)

The White Horse though is very much and always be the original home from home 5YLAC Films, many memories of adventures and misadventures! luckily i only work 5 minutes away from it at the moment :-)

Last Nights meeting was basically a "pre-meet". what is a pre-meet ? well we've been having loads of them recently across the 5YLAC barracks. what i call a pre-meet has basically evolved from what has worked before in run ups to other shoots and hopefully now we have it right. The 5YLAC definition of a pre-meet is it is a meeting where the director (thats me!) and the Head of Department/Department meet informally and discuss the script and initial ideas/concepts over a beer. The end result of the meeting is the HOD goes away and works on those initial ideas. Nothing is in Stone at this point.

TO give you the bigger picture, There is a deadline in place off November for all departments to have initial budgets , concepts, initial plans of action in place, then over December those initial thoughts are going to be started to tie down.

As said there have been several across the barracks at the moment. The first meeting was with Eddie (Animation) and Brian (Composer) back at the end of October. I was really please to have these two in the same room together as the last bit of shooting mainly revolves round the puppeteer character (casting for that soon) and Eddie who is doing the animation, is also building the puppeteers theatre which is crucial to the puppeteers character as it is really his effigy(sic). Also with the music, it should reflect not only his life, but for he is one of the ultimate showman. It was a great meeting, it was really reverse engineering a character. The Puppeteer is over 300 old and of a faustian nature, and it was a great conversation going around table working out the back story behind the character. before i went into that meeting the character sheet for the puppeteer was a page and a half, after that meeting it has now grown to about 3 pages.


Though both Eddie and Brian are buggers cause they planted this idea in my head about Tony (the other character in the final shoot) discarding a motorcycle tyre which i couldnt get out of my head and caused much cursing at the keyboard trying to write in.


The Next pre meet took place with Rookie and his Merry men, Rookie is building the set for the puppeteers workshop (where the final shoot takes place) and is also responsible for the props and costume aspect. had a stinking evil commuter cold (why cant people cover their mouths when they cough on the train!!!!) and could hardly speak through that meeting, but aside from that it was a very productive meeting.

There have also been various phone and e-mail exchanges across other departments all on this pre-meet basis, and to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. this saturday we have a general crew meeting to update everyone involved.

over december/january (curs-ed xmas), the process will be repeated, ie seperate meetings with departments to tie things down though this time it will be more formal, and then a group meeting to bring everyone up to date.

Once that is all out of the way then the plans are put into action and leads us up to the shoot. well thats the plan anyway and unfortunatly its not quite that simple as the list of things to do mutates at a alarming rate the nearer you get to a shoot, but by having the basic organisation there it keeps everything from breaking down into anarchy and makes it manageable ( laughing can be heard in the distance)

So moving onto last nights meeting, the pre-meet for cinematography!

the main thing to come out of the meeting was kit. before on previous MI shoots we have had a fair amount of lighting kit and "toys". The final shoot takes place in the pupppeteers workshop, there's this whole realtity within reality thing going on and to contrast the footage that is going to be shot there with the rest of the film, i want to limit the kit we are going to use.

The film to date has been shot on a DSR-500 DV Cam, for the next bit of shooting we are going to downsize to a PD150. Lighting wise, as you can see from the previous shoots we normally have a overflowing transit load, we are going to have probably just a Dado light kit and a couple of red-heads. Toy wise the Dolly will be there and also we need to get in a mini cjib crane in which will be the first time we have used one of a 5YLAC shoot so looking forward to that.

going back to this reality within a reality, the concept im trying to acheive is i really like the opening of faust where the director is talking to the clown before jumping into the story of faust, and im trying to acheive a similiar thing with MI in terms of this outside world from the story. it does get a fair bit more complicated than that but youll have to wait and see the film !

A lot of what has been shot so far has been very cinematic, there are a lot of "big"(ie tracks, movement etc) shots and there is a very deliberate slow pace in the shots so far. for the final shoot the pace is going to be picked up and im looking to acheive a very nitty gritty nasty realism look for the shoot to help aid in this whole reality within a reality doobrie. Also i am not storyboarding this shoot.

to have a waffle about storyboards, for the very first shoot of MI there was a shot list, floor plans and camera movement diagrams which worked succesfully on Deadlights, but on the MI shoot i found myself doing a lot of storyboards on the fly so for the second shoot i decided to storyboard, which you can see in the albums. They wernt very succesful storyboards, they worked to some degree but one of the things i have since learnt is for storyboards and i think is an area where a lot of people go wrong as well, is depth and perspective are absolutley vital for the format you are shooting on. what i mean by this if you draw somethign which cant be framed on the camera or lens you are shooting on then its a bugger! For the third and fourth shoots i again did storyboards this time a hell of a lot more succesfully you can see them up on the walls in the club in the mi third shoot album and also there's another example in the fourth shoot in the what goes into a shot sequence of pictures. They were drawn on computer which made them extremly quick to do, and though they look rough and ready they certainly do the job and i think their finest hour was at the chapel shoot.

shooting without storyboards or even a shot list is risky business, there are certain SFX shots and sequences which will have shot lists as it would be ludicrous to do them without, but the bulk of shooting will be done without. The shooting with the storyboards has been very smooth as im going for the nitty gritty i want to take that element out. Also point to make here is that im not going to simply just turn up and shoot blind. over the coming week's to the run up to the shoot there will be many talks with cinematography regarding actual shots and i will have a plan in my head of what i want to shoot and how and hopefully cinematography will have a good concept of that as well. To be able to succesfully do this, a great deal of it fulls on to the continuity guy to make sure we get the right amount of coverage. Luckily we have got a sh*t hot continuity guy in the form of Samhu. We have tried catching him out many a time, from flipping costumes around, moving props, jetting him out to a foreign location whilst he's asleep and more, but have yet to succeed in catching him out. Without someone as good as Samhu i would not be able to do this.

Another thing to come out of the meeting last night was logging. The logging on the last two shoots and in general over MI hasnt been brilliant. Where we have also had different people doing the job there is no consitency across the logs. This is somethign that has been addressed before but its one of those things that get mentioned then seems to dissapear to the bottom of the list of things to do, so it was good that it was bought up and hopefully this time round it wont slip to the bottom again.

The rest of the night was mainly talking about Stephen King books, the first world war and future 5YLAC films, most likely the next film is going to be a comedy as i really need to get it out of my system. The script i have is entitled Ying Yang Ying Yang po, Nigel A Fishant of the N A Fishant cocktail umbrella factory dies unexpected. Can Arthur Cheese his trusted side kick save the factory from being repossesed by the Little Bank of Scicilly ? Featuring such classic love songs as there is somethign in the air tonight and its not the sewage works! as said need to get it out of my system!

All in all though a very succesful meeting, hopefully saturdays meeting will be equally as good.


Oh and for a PS my plan of being "sensible" went straight out the window last night,not for the want of trying. note to self must try harder.