Sunday, August 18, 2013

Filming in Cyprus

The last two weeks I've been filming in Cyprus. It has been a real joy... and pain to be back filming. A joy because I love filming, but a pain trying to co-ordinate dates and availability of the crew and actors.
Somehow whenever I arranged the dates something crashed in on them and made it impossible and forced me to reschedule! At last we got to be filming. It's not complete yet, but the majority has been shot now.
The films are two short stories trying to communicate the love of God as our Father to people from the Middle East. They are like modern parables. We started by writing the stories, then recorded audio versions and at each stage checked with people around the region that they worked. Finally we committed to film.
This was also a change in technology for me. Up till now we have been filming in 'SD' or standard definition. This was a move up to 'HD' (high definition) but also towards electronic cinematography rather than just 'video'.
This meant that we are trying to make it look like electronic film. So the focus is incredibly tight and we need a 'focus-puller' as well as DOP (Director of Photography). The results were varied. Some I'm extremely pleased with... some we will re-shoot in a couple of weeks time. Overall though I'm very, very pleased.
What was particularly good was to have my oldest son over here for the filming as sound recordist. 

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