So far the most complicated grip situation was when Freddie wanted to shoot into a toilet cubicle from the top during his 5 minute drama. Luckily we had Hamish McIntyre at hand, a cool grip who works with FilmTec, where we went today to try out different grip equipment. FilmTec is based in Seaview and run by Dion Hartley, who has been key grip on big NZ productions such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Van Helsing, King Kong and X Men 3. He was also recently grip on Peter Jackson’s test shoot of the new digital Red camera.
His workshop is an Aladdin’s cave of gear, cars, rigging and tools to make more useful bits. As we are now gearing up for using the 16mm camera for our grad films, we tried out laying dolly tracks and rigging car mounts for shooting moving scenes. We will be back at this location for our 16mm film intensive week next week, when we are each shooting a short scenario for a half day.
t that camera! Sara and I spent the afternoon being extras - or featured background artists - on a short film being shot at Wellington airport. The directors are former film school students from Belgium who have shipped over their crew, DoP and a very fancy new Sony F-23. They needed a bunch of people to be travellers, so we arrived with suitcases and change of tops to stand at the luggage carousel next to the real actors. I loved being on set again, even as just an extra, and to see how other sets are run and how everyone does their jobs. Took a load of photos, which are up 
This week, while writing the first drafts of our grad scripts, we were given a fun project to keep us entertained: animation. Make a 30 second animation using any technique. I took the opportunity to get into Motion, Apple’s animation program, which is part of Final Cut Studio. Oh, and I used copious amounts of iLife sound effects. See it below or on YouTube (or here).
Easier said than done. I was overjoyed to see the quality of images we managed to create during the shoot, but working as a director with an editor is hard. For me, since I edit a lot myself, not being able to touch the keyboard and make changes as I see fit has been frustrating, but having a new view on the footage from someone who wasn’t at the shoot has been extremely helpful, too. So there are two sides to this.
I have been editing Jake’s shoot, and it has been a complete pleasure. Instead of finding it simplistic, as I did when I was editing fiction footage before, instead I find it a whole new challenge, frame accurate editing to make a smooth flow of the shots one into another.