August 26th 2011. Filming has started.

The blog that went away! The play finished in another life time; finished well I believe. Full houses most of the time and many compliments although it was hard to keep up with day to day real political dramas!

Now we’re into Love Patrol season five and have completed a month of night shoots. We have new cameras; Cannon 5ds and prime lenses. The image looks gorgeous and what you can do with depth of field compared to the old JVCs is a daily delight!

Funny and not so funny moments:

We had a very good night shoot outside a store in Tagabe. 2 days later the peeling white frontage had been painted green and we have 2 day shoots still to go! So we will try and blast away some of the coat of green and repaint integrating earth as we go.

The schedule is all drawn up and we have been shooting for a week when one cast member announces she is 4 months pregnant and I have some scenes planned for when she would be 7 months …so more work on the schedule required.

There’s a lot of action in this series by our standards and I became frightened all the episodes were a little short so Jo’s been adding scenes and extending dialogue as we go which has been stressful for actors.

Lovely moment the other night whilst we’re waiting in the road in Tagabe for darkness to descend. A middle aged man comes up, shakes my hand and says ‘They must pay to visit the cave’. This is the line of the adviser to the chief from our 1994 film Pacific Star, a part presumably played by this gentleman. Some of the young members of the group most impressed by the heritage they are now part of!

That ‘fabric feeling ‘ was very strong when watching the youth hiphop group perform at the ceremony to mark Ausaid’s handing over of a million dollars to buy all the buildings we currently rent, thus securing the premises for youth for the coming decades. Some of them weren’t born when WSB started in 1989 and we were a 4 man gang doing plays about diarrhoea. Jo was next to me and we smiled at each other in that late middle age way of a ‘journey shared’ moment , trying to ignore the number of expletives in the song the kids were dancing to; looking too uncannily like recent pictures of masked rioters in London. But the energy of their dance seemed to give it such a positive vibe.

Ausaid also officially revealed our new gear transporting lorry with eye catching graphics.I must start putting photos on this blog.