Well. There we have it. The first shoot is done. It’s in the can and the can is good.

The film follows ten characters over one Friday night, though we don’t see any of their faces. We had eight ‘hand models’ take the ten leading roles. They were all fantastic, without exception. They were Danny Eastwood, Karen Ney, Nick Blair, Neil Walshe, Basir Salleh, Hayley Basham, Alysha Farry and our producer Esta Lau.

In terms of crew, we kept it very lean and everyone worked extremely hard for the duration of the shoot which wrapped five minutes before midnight. I can’t thank our DoP Rupert Brown, Producer Esta Lau and Art Department Andrew Bell enough.

Our DoP (Director of Photography) Rupert Brown was kind enough to let us shoot the entire film in and around his apartment. This we dressed in numerous ways to represent the ten different locations depicted in the film. Thanks to his expertise and the skills of our one man Art Department, Andrew Bell we were able to turn a corner of the apartment into a restaurant, another into an office and another into a nightclub and so on.

When we tried to turn the kitchen into a bar however, we were thwarted. No matter what we dressed it with, and how convincing the lighting, our bar top (the kitchen bench) just kept turning it into a bad scene from daytime TV. After many attempts we decided to abandon our efforts and have our character reclining on his balcony instead of propped up at the bar. Within minutes of setting up the balcony shot, we knew this was the way to go, and it turned out to be one of my favourite shots in the film.

The trickiest part of the shoot was the logistical nightmare I had unwittingly created for myself with the series of mobile phones that feature in the film. The story required them all to be interconnected and I think I underestimated just how complex this would be, especially while trying to deal with the usual demands of directing a shoot. We got there in the end and that’s the main thing. But there were a couple of moments where my brain was about to walk out on me.

Now the editing process begins. I’ll share a couple of shots from the film shortly.

Bam! A wrap on the first shoot