Had the mother of all bad days today. Well good and bad in equal measure and equal strength.
Got in late about 10, put my bag in the room and turned on the computer, went to get a brew and talk to someone in the tech office about the ProTools computer which is acting up, went back to my office with a guy who needed his computer looking at only to discover in the 10 minutes I'd been out of the room someone had come into my office and stolen a students computer and my DVD player.
I didn't realise what had gone on for a while, but I pieced it together. When I'd come back into the room my computer was switched off. The theif had come in, turned off the switch in the middle of my bank of switches which runs the computers and the DVD player, unplugged the students computer (not mine thankfully) and the DVD player, stuffed them under their coat and left the building. So after having found the perfect little DVD player, first it broke and I had to get it replaced, then it was stolen. Someone doesn't want me to have one of those things. The students computer that was stolen was broken, true, but it was her Powerbook and she was very shocked to have it stolen as she was very attached to it. Felt really guilty about it being stolen while in my care, but I wasn't to know that burglars knew anything about the layout of our school. Obviously they've been doing their homework.
After all this at lunchtime I was due to take a meeting of the cast and crew of "The Sacrament". After having my stuff stolen I wasn't really in the mood, but I thought it was our last chance to get together before the break, so I thought what the hell.
As it turned out it was great. I talked to them about our plans, Haldis the costume supervisor showed them some of the designs for the costumes, I showed them some storyboards done by my friend Lee Sullivan (
www.leesullivan.co.uk) which were really cool, and then I showed them a teaser trailer containing a CG image of lamia's lair and credits I put together in iMovie. As Nigel Thomas, a friend of mine said at the time, I did the thing you should always do for actors; show them their name in lights. There was a cheer as their names came up, it was a beautiful moment. Then the coup de gras, at that point I showed them what I had in my bag... a load of prop guns.
I showed Ben my leading man the Mac 11 with silencer that I want his character to use. That closed the deal pretty much. A lot of the other actors handled the guns and really liked them. (I have a very large collection I've been saving for just such an occaision.) So all in all everyone left totally jazzed about doing the film and on board for the forseeable. After the actors went I stayed behind with Simon my DoP and Corina my production designer and shot through a few ideas. Cori has come up with some wicked concepts, but she said she had some more pictures and would bring them in.
So from one of the worst days of my life to one of the best in the space of about an hour and a half.
After work I went out with Nigel and Paul, an ex-employee of the school and we went off on what could be described as either a pub crawl or a bender, take your pick. We got ass-faced and staggered about being noisy and
lairy and had a thouroughly marvelous time. We ended up in Renatos, a famous late night theatre drinking hole down in King Street, tired as a newt and eating pizza. Got back to Nigel's about 3am and fell asleep as soon as my crumpled body hit the spare futon.
Ah blessed whirling black oblivion, welcome your tired brother into your inky spiral.
What a day.
