The Gifted Babies

Decided to create a Facebook page for the film where I’ll be posting news and media specific to the film there as well as here.

Link

I should have updated the site sooner but better late than never as they say. Memoirs of a Cat Burglar is well into production at the moment.  This would mark Milton’s fifth outing in a Gifted Babies production ( including two abandoned projects ) and his first outing where he doesn’t kill someone. We had begun shooting since the end of July and are hoping the get the principle photography completed before the end of September, so far the shoots have been a great experience. Memoirs of a Cat Burglar tells the story of one man, Klaus Sharpe ( played by Fabian Sweeney ), who documents his struggles with life as he occasionally turns into a feline kleptomaniac whenever the opportunity to steal something presents itself.

Depending on the final product and the reception it receives, there may be more parts/sequels being made based on this character. I will post more updates on our progress as the production continues.

… is now online.

Finally handed in our submission to Mutant Shorts’ 3rd short film competition a few hours ago, since it has been quite an intensive two weeks I’ve had little time to post updates on the other production days. To summarise in a short statement, they went great. The film will be screened next week on Thursday 17th June at the Savoy for anyone interested in going to see it. I will be starting work on the film’s second edition soon, with numerous fixes and enhancements put into to this version that I couldn’t put into the Mutant Shorts one due to time constraints. I will hopefully have it posted on the website before the end of June in its glorious High-Def form.

Update: We won! How Awesome.

… is now online.

Shoot yesterday too a little longer than expected since we had only 4 small scenes to shoot we weren’t expecting it to last 4 hours but it is coming together nicely. Time flies I suppose. A crew of 4 this time around, we’ve had Piratehelm joining us to assist in make-up and set design. Thankfully the weather remained the same as it was two weeks ago which will help to keep up the consistency. Saying that, it will interesting to see how these new scenes will blend in with the earlier footage since Cethan shaved the beard off specifically for the shoot.

We used the jib again to shoot these scenes, which worked perfectly since we managed to shoot at some really good angles despite the fact that the crammed environment made the process difficult to manage. We’ve also had to wrestle with environmental lighting, given the time of day and the weather we were having, it was the background lighting that had the bad habit of silhouetting our actor . In the end this was fixed using a combination of carefully angled shots and a 100 Watt light bulb.

We hope to be finished filming this Tuesday, followed by the post production process and the insert shooting.

Happy to say the shoot went fairly well in Camden Palace, initially a crew of six, we were also joined by Keith O’Connell to lend us a helping hand. This time filming took place in a laboratory setting which devoured almost 2 hours of preparation before we were good to go. As well as cleaning the room we had booked we also had to make two round trips to my place to collect additional equipment and props. Camden’s owner, Bertrand, was nice enough to lend us some old lab equipment, as well as gave us permission to scavenge any other set of items we find. And plenty we did find and use.

Fabian Sweeney and Catherine Crowley put on a great performance for their part of power starved scientists, more impressively this would mark the first time I’ve worked on a short film where the actors knew their lines before filming their scenes, granted, previous productions only ever involved myself, Cethan, Aida and Piratehelm ( although this allowed plenty of room for improvisation ). The shoot lasted roughly 3 hours with very few breaks in between since we had to take into account we had somewhat of a limited time frame, I’m pretty sure the rest of the crew noticed my eagerness to shoot as soon as possible when I started recording before Fiona or Gemma ( co-directing ) could say ‘action’.

I’m currently loving the newly purchased dolly mount and jib arm we had to drag over to the location and take some time out to setup, you wouldn’t believe how much freedom they can provide when moving the camera around on set and also how much damage they can cause if you forget that the combined equipment only works well in spacious settings and not when people are standing close by. It won’t be long until someone bangs their head or knee against the jib arm, at least it will make the work environment just that bit more interesting.

Glancing over the recorded footage and suffice to say most of it turned out very well. Sadly however, the first few shots were recorded without sound, stupidly enough I had forgotten to turn on the audio device, so let that be a lesson for anyone else hooking up their only Shotgun Mic to their only camera, these things do need power. Since entire scenes required no colour in the end product it was nice to see what the footage looked like without it, by isolating the luminance ( Black and white ) channel you can easily spot small objects in the video footage in greater detail.

The final shoot will hopefully conclude this weekend, as it’s our final weekend before the deadline. We’ll be attending the Fastnet Film Festival the weekend after. The deadline is the 4th of June so editing the film over weekdays is going to be fun for sure.