10 Things I Learned On The DIALW Recce

Yesterday the director, headline actress, and myself recce'd the main Hampshire locations for 'Dark Is A Long Way' (DIALW). The main reasons for me to recce locations are to minimise surprises, take some test footage and figure out where everyone is going to park on the day. That said, here is what I have taken away from the day:

1. Tripods are boring. Seriously, I setup a tripod shot and I already felt like I had an albatross around my neck. I am the human tripod!

2. The high contrast black & white look is really going to compliment the subject matter, as is the season (winter) that we are shooting in. All the stills on this page are extracted video frames.

3. You can add locations to 'Favorites' in the Maps app on iPhone. With varying degrees of accuracy depending on your cell and wifi environment.

4. You can extract the latitude/longitude metadata from a photo snapped on iPhone and use that in the iPhone TomTom app to create an email that will open the co-ordinates in Google Maps or TomTom Route Planner. Great for call sheets.

5. The Vivobarefoot Scott really is waterproof. However the sole is not a great performer on wet grass at a gradient.

6. Spinney Hollow is an awesome self-sufficient homestead and also has structures that will be great in our movie. We can also burn a person at the stake there.

7. The vistas found in the New Forest look great with winter atmospheric perspective.

8. The glass-bottomed aquarium may look too small, but the actress can get her head in it and the iPhone can frame things well from underneath.

9. Winchester city rubbish tip is like an Ikea surplus store.

10. My strategy of using gloved hands and a stylus to operate the iPhone touchscreen is not going to work reliably. I may have to get a cold finger for art's sake.

All in all a very useful day that allowed me to get satnav bookmarks for all locations ahead of the first day of shooting this coming Saturday.


BONUS: what I learned creating this blog post - this many pictures when authoring a Blogger post are a pain in the ass to format (as I'm sure you can see, for which I apologise!)