Second day's shooting on The Sacrament. Well when I say second day's shooting what I mean is that we are into the second day's filming of the demo of the first bit of the movie.

(pic by Matt Kelland, left to right; Phil, Joe Pitcher, Natalie Ball. click for bigger version)

More shots, more setups, more of everything. Today we had the addition of Natalie Ball as Nurse Hellion. Nat couldn't be with us yesterday so we kind of filmed around her. But today we filmed her entrance into the room all dressed in milk white pleather. The costume was custom made for her by our incredible costume supervisor/designer Haldis Gothard, and it looks amazing. People were swinging by the set just to see Nat in costume. She did look fabulous. Her eyes are made up really black so when she widens her eyes the effect is totally electric. We've got so many really cool shots this week. Several times today instead of "cut" I said... well it wasn't cut, anyway. There's something really cool about "getting the shot". The more I do this, the more I think I'm all about "getting the shot".

Had a visit to the set today from Matt Kelland, who regular readers of this blog will remember was kind of a prime mover behind this project happening in the first place. I think the phrase he used was "I think you basically got to stop talking about it and actually make this movie." Anyway it was nice to see him and show him what we were doing. I think he had a good time watching a movie being made. Also he shot some pictures, which is something I wasn't able to do very much, being busy an'all.

Later in the afternoon, one of our actors was having trouble with his lines. Nick only got the script the day before we started filming and he's been up against it all the time we were filming, but this afternoon the pressure stepped up as we were doing his stuff to camera. He fluffed a few times, then that led to drying, and finally I could see he was getting really frustrated. I changed approach a little to compensate. We'd been shooting whole scenes to get lots of coverage, shots we can use to patch holes in the edit, and this was working well with Joe and Natalie who'vehad weeks to prepare. But I decided there and then to shoot small fragments with Nick to allow him the time to focus on it. We ran the lines one by one. He nailed every one of them.

Nick had the toughest time through the shoot and he was the one who came the furthest. Joe and Nat were already two of my favourite actors, but I didn't know Nick at all and he was a bit of an unknown quantity. But he worked so hard in the face of really stacked odds and I have to love him for that. I have a really great cast and I'm really looking forward to working with them on the full length film.

Final day of Easter shoot tomorrow. We'll be getting some other cast members in for publicity shots, and hopefully I'll be able to get a sword or two. I will be packing a bag of prop guns too. Oh yeah we'll also be filming Nick's capture (Nat clubs him in the head with a hammer) and Nat leading him down into the torture room. We'll also be performing a pickup shot or two and Vicky Boreham (as Sister June) posing as a receptionist in Dr Bone's clinic.

After all the hard work of this week it'll be like playtime.