Archive for April, 2009

Easter break

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Unfortunately I have not progressed an awful lot over the last three weeks. However, despite this I have hit a couple of major milestones…

The dates for the shoot are now set in stone and I have finally managed to book the green screen room which is a big weight of my mind. It has taken so long to arrange that I thought it was never going to happen, so you can imagine my relief when the confirmation came through!

I have also given up trying to contact Mayur because I have not had any response from him since I offered him the part. Instead I contacted Adal and asked if he still wanted to take part. Thankfully he accepted and I sent him the script through… I just hope he is going to take it seriously!

Finally, it seems as though I may have lost my make-up artist which is a shame. She said that she was available on the dates and has since notified me that she can no longer make it. If this is the case then I am going to have to buy some powder myself – something which I know nothing about! …Hopefully she can give me some friendly advice about what to buy and how to apply it!

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Script Read-Through

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Last Friday morning I managed to get all of my cast together (well… nearly all) for a complete run through of the script. It turned out that I could only get them all in the same room for one hour in that entire week! – so good luck arranging the shoot which needs to run for an entire day! The attendees were Peter, Lucas, Ryan, Suhail, and Shabaz…Oliver couldn’t make it and Mayur is still AWOL! (I am thinking of asking Suhail’s friend to take the part if I do not hear from him very soon).

Due to the fact that we only had an hour we had to get through things quickly. We had a brief discussion and then got stuck straight into the script. There were a couple of things that I stopped to pick up on but all in all it went really well. Suhail was a bit off but I can forgive him for that because I haven’t even sat down with him to go through his lines since I gave him the part… I made the mistake of not noting down the time that we started reading because I thought that we would have time to go through the whole thing once more with no stopping. However I was wrong and we could only do two more scenes for the second time. At a guess I think that the script is about 20 minutes, which is what I guessed originally anyway.

All that is left to do now is source the props and book the date of the shoot… Fingers crossed!

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Costume Design

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Scene one of Work Mates Episode One – ‘The Call Centre’, takes place at Tom and Nathan’s graduation ceremony, and therefore a couple of gowns are needed as costumes. In scene two, Nathan is again seen wearing his gown in the scene where they are sat at home. Due to the fact that robes are very expensive to hire I decided to call on a couple of friends who study Fashion Design to make them for me. Over the last couple of days the main gowns have been created, only leaving the coloured sashes to be completed.

The garments have turned out brilliantly and I owe the two girls a big favour. They have gone out of their way to help me out and I have saved a lot of money!

Below are a few shots of the robes being made, from initial template design to the finished product:

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Open Web Content

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Something that I have failed to mention so far in relation to the Work Mates project, is my passion for promoting more open Web content. As a result of my dissertation research, and the conclusions that I arrived at, I have really started to believe that the best route forward is to push for more open access to everything that is published on the Internet. The Web inspires people and breeds creativity, and we should embrace it rather than try to stop people from “infringing copyright”. In many ways it benefits the producer of such material, especially as it allows more people to see/hear/play with it. If people respect the purpose of the original material then I see no reason for everything to be freely available.

I may sound naive in saying this, because obviously there are many other things to consider. However, even though my dissertation is purely focussed on music, many of the arguments can be applied to most of the content on the Internet. It discusses the most significant of these in much detail and rationally puts them to rest. (”The Future of Digital Music: How to Overcome the Copyright Crisis” will be available to download in the near future if anyone is interested).

Anyway, back to my original point… My interest in promoting this whole idea has lead me to add as much content to the Work Mates website as possible and encourage it all to be downloaded, shared, and creatively edited (so long as appropriate recognition is given). The episodes will be downloadable in two both SD and HD, the scripts are available, as are many backstage photos and interviews with the cast and crew.

This is something that i really feel strongly about and will push as much as possible. It will be really interesting if people take my material and make something new with it… push it beyond its original intensions and reach more people than I ever could on my own.

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