FILMING A Birthday Suprise (CUT SHORT)
18.3 I made the stew, brownies, and the cake the night before.
I first made the vegetable stew. It ended up smelling really nice, and made me want to have some. I made a huge amount of it so that the actors could eat some and it wouldn’t be a problem. It was in a big steel pot and we just used that on set.
I then made the brownies with the brownie mix, but my impossible oven burnt the top of it and left the middle uncooked. Needles to say it wasn´t very nice, but I thought it didn´t matter too much as nobody would have to eat it. I tried making another batch of brownies though because the Tupperware looked stupidly empty. Again, I just thought it would be for decoration, so I just made them without following any kind of recipe. They turned out slightly better than the other ones, but still not great. They were strangely sticky :). But they still looked the part and the Tupperware box looked much less empty. I thought I did an okay job, and that we´d make nicer brownies for the day when the grandma would actually have to eat one. Turns out though that they added a shot of Kev eating a brownie (filmed on the 20th) which I wasn´t aware of. Poor Reece had to eat my really bad brownies on camera.
I had some issues with the cake. The inspiration was RAF themed as Julia wanted, and we wanted to keep it simple, because we knew we had to make two. We decided to just do the simple logo as shown below.
Unfortunately, it was harder to do as I had imagined. After mixing the colours with the icing, I just drippled the icing on top and hoped to guide it just with a spoon, but it ended up dribbling everywhere. As you can see in the picture my first try was a failure. Luckily, we still had the second cake. I thought we´d just get another one of the cakes from Sainsburys to decorate later when we needed it. Andreea helped me this second time and had the great idea of using a paint brush to paint the cake. It obviously meant there was no leaking and was a lot more precise. I had also mixed the blue into a nicer darker blue. The paint strokes looked quite nice as well, so I was happy with our second attempt at the cake. It´s not perfect, but maybe it´s good that it looks homemade, if it´s meant to be one of Charlie´s family members that made it.
19th-20th
 |
| Continuity photo |
 |
| Mine and Claud´s books on the shelf |
It was exciting to watch the filming, although I didn´t do too much other
than that. I took some continuity photos, which was mainly needed when Rachel
threw her clothes around. I also helped Ieva a little bit with the camera and
did some of the marking with the clapper board.
The next day they continued filming at Julias house, but I wasn´t
feeling great so Claud agreed to be on standby for them. That´s when they
filmed the scene with Kev eating the brownie.
21st
We got up early again to get to the set before the actors arrived. Claud
and I had a lot to do. We started by trying to get all the photos up. We
replaced the family´s who owned the house photos with the fake family photos I
had printed the day before. We put the nicest photos in the frames to bring attention
to them. Some of the photos I had also decided already where I wanted to put
them, like the smallest baby photo, I thought it would be perfect to replace
the small photo on the wall on top of the other small art photos. (first picture under) I had brought
some of my own photos too because I was scared that we had wasn´t enough. I was
unfortunately right, so we had to use some of them, and they were quite random.
On photo wall 1 we had to make sure we covered some hooks and stains. In
the big frame in the middle we made a sort of collage of photos with a cheesy
quote. (I think that frame would´ve looked really good with a nice big photo but
oh well). We then added some photos around it to cover the things that needed
to be covered. On its left side we used the cheesy photo frame we found from a
charity shop. Two of the photos are mine. We made sure to turn off the screen
that was there and added a little I love you quote there. We also covered a dog
quote with another one we found at the house, as the family in the film don´t
have a dog. I don´t think it was the absolute perfect set decorating, but we
did the best we could with what we have. From afar especially I think it was really
quiet alright.
 |
| Photo wall 2 |
The rest of the set dressing consisted of making the table as before,
wrapping presents, baking bread rolls to have next to the stew, putting up the banner,
the birthday cards, and the brownies in the kitchen. We were extremely happy
with how everything looked in the end. We wanted it to look homely with cheesy party decorations, which is exactly what we did.
  |
| I even had a French Bible, which I thought was funny Once the filming started, we were able to enjoy watching it. We just had
to occasionally get up to move stuff around or put things back in place. It was
an extremely enjoyable experience, after the stress of the morning. |
Unfortunately, the rest of the shooting had to be cancelled due to a lot
of covid going around. I was one of the lucky few who managed to dodge it.
I really loved working on this film, and it thought me a lot about what
it´s like working on a bigger film production. We had a big cast and crew and
great locations which I found all to be so exciting. It confirmed that film is
what I truly want to go into, so I´m really glad Julia trusted me with the
position of production designer. I was obviously upset when the shoot got
cancelled. We put so much work into this (especially Julia! We all know she
worked like crazy) I really hope she is able to film it all later on.
Comments
Post a Comment