Homeless and eve of the shoot

THEN DISASTER!

The Thursday before the shoot on Monday at my DOP’s advice I called up the facility house at Bowlers to double check we were good. Of course we were!
We would be sharing our shooting space with Amazon doing some recruitment drive but apart from that…!

So we now had to share the fucking bay with Amazon who were obviously paying more than us and ect. Our evil guy at Bowlers asked could we shoot nights if not he would put in a dividing curtain to keep them from us.
We went into full…blown…PANIC MODE. Seriously what the fuck? Never mind noise pollution but light pollution? FOUR days before my shoot.

I started ringing everyone including the previous Sharp Project facility but everyone was either full or not picking up the phone due to COVID issues. I contacted the only person I thought could help me Danny Hussain a location Manager. he informed me of two places, one in Altrincham south Manchester and 25 minutes away from where we were. The other was in Chester, which meant a lot of travel for thirty plus people.

Chester got back to me first with an affirmative and the bay was big enough. Eventually we got hold of Altrincham. The rates were good and they were both available for the dates we needed. Although we technically had the fire out I couldn’t calm down because we hadn’t seen the space yet and it was an unknown quantity. I had a shit nights sleep but Mike and I met up on the Friday at the new space. We scoped the place out and it looked fantastic it has 3 phase power and was relatively noise free. My only concern was a small crack down the centre of the room where the set would go but Mike and I measured it up and found the optimum point for the set and Technocrane to go. We alerted everyone and on my way home I broke the news to Bowlers who were unthrilled to say the least. Why was I pulling out at the 11th hour etc. Even though I explained the space was no unusable because of Amazon, trouble was they had my money and I didn’t know if I was going to get it back again…

I tried my best that weekend to relax but I was wound up and annoyed as all I wanted to do was go over the shot-list and deal with nothing but the creative side and yet I was back to stressing about producer matters.

THE DAY BEFORE THE DAY

Sunday I was getting all the belongings I needed ready for the following day but at 7pm I met up with Hugo our actor who had arrived at Manchester Piccadilly. We checked him into his apartment which seemed really nice. Hugo and I left for a meal at Pizza Express and we shot the shit for the evening finding common ground but all the time I was looking at how amazing he was going to be in this film.