Squid Media Ireland » Pre-production

Second workshop completed!

Dave — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:02:35 +0000

Today myself, Sarah McDonald (Donna Bradley), Michael Grant (Andy Blaikie) and Brian McDonald (Simon Fogarty) got together and worked out the relationship between their characters as well as their character backgrounds.

Then we had the chance to run though some heavy scenes and we got some really great stuff out of it.

I want to thank the guys for their time today. That’s the two major workshops done – just a few little pickups here and there!

I’m starting to think I won’t even have to turn up next week

The Tech of Shackled

Ambrose — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:02:01 +0000

As Dave will be discussing the creative side of Shackled in terms of acting and direction, I thought I should take you all through the technical side of the film, in relation to crew, equipment and shooting style.

The crew will be very minimal. The technical people on the shoot will consist of two camera operators (myself and Ashling), a sound person (Ciara), an assistant camera person (Conor) and another AC when necessary (Ged). I will be acting as Cinematographer on the film, though I look forward to collaborating with Ashling who is turning out to be an excellent DoP herself.

We’re shooting the film with two filtered Sony HDR FX1E cameras – one for close ups and one for wide shots. As each scene will be improvised, it’s best to get as much coverage as we can, as no two takes will be the same. Sound will be recorded with either radio mics or a boom pole, depending on the scene. The tech tests have gone well so far. We’ll be having more over the next week in the run up to the shoot. We have to finalise some interesting techniques, but I’ll give more details about these over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for lots more updates!

First acting workshop done!

Dave — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:01:26 +0000

Just wanted to let you all know that the first acting workshop for Shackled went ahead this morning with Jacob Lowry (Gerry Shanahan) and Fiona Smith (Sara White).

It went really well – we defined the characters in a lot of detail, both individually and how they relate to each other and the overall story.

We also talked about how we would run through the actual improvisations on the set and even had time to workshop out a couple of important scenes.

The performances were fanastic, I was really happy to see the characters coming to life and to see the guys getting into them so easily – great to see the earlier discussions paying off!

I want to thank the guys for their hard work today!

I’m feeling really good about this film!