This has been a pretty fun process despite some of the hurdles we ran into. It's got me thinking a lot about how I would do things differently next time and how to plan.
One thing that I really wanted to to do, which would have helped, I think, tremendously in the role of director, is having rehearsals. We did have a read through with Barney and Candid (Chris and Michael K) before we decided who would be who (and I think the right decision was made in that department). It certainly helped me in the role of the writer at least, so I could reword certain parts of dialogue so it would make more sense or just sound more fluid and natural. But I still really wish we had rehearsals. That's the bother with having four actors in the one scene. Eesh.
Directing the actors and engaging with them to help give you the best performance they can is actually quite rewarding in a way. Some actors certainly need more direction than others, whereas some barely need any at all. I suppose it goes straight back to finding the time for rehearsals so you can get the actual shoot done as quickly as possible.
A few times, excluding read throughs and discovering issues there, there had been necessities to rewrite or rework parts of a scene. We had to completely omit a character (who was the 'voice of reason' in Barney's head essentially) entirely because of just how difficult it was to get them. Thankfully, it was easy enough to adapt as it wasn't a major character that we were missing; we just used a 'key object' or prop as sorts that recurred throughout the script as a replacement of that.
I would say that the exterior scene, the one where the characters of Barney and Candid are skipping stone, was the most difficult scene to shoot, purely due to the conditions. It wasn't raining or anything like that thankfully, but having to deal with wind being picked up despite using a windshield and forcing us to dub over the scene in the edit, and the difficulty of getting to the tide and back and vice versa was a little bit of a challenge.
That and the final scene. The final scene where Barney tries skipping stones himself after his realisation or 'awakening' I suppose you could say, was far too dark and had to be reshot. The plan was to use a couple of large halogen bulb torches so the night scene was possible but, unfortunately, I just didn't have the money at the time (this shot just before our loans came in so I couldn't have given the film a slight budget like I'd previously wanted to). Needing to be reshot simply as a day scene was needed to tackle this problem, but I also wanted to do it with the torches once I got them. I had an LED torch, but it was quite a small one, so it looked obvious that we were shining a torch in Chris' face. So, from that, I knew it could be done, but it was just tricky. Too dark, and the scene just looks like a grainy mess. That's one of the major problems with exterior scenes at night; trying to find good, decent light sources that are battery powered.
If I had the time and the money, there is so much that I would have done differently. I'm dead happy with how everything has turned out so far, having a good crew helping to get things done, like Caoimhe on producing, Andy on camera, and Matt on both sound and camera at certain times, it definitely turned out looking really, really well. It's just needing more time to prep far more thoroughly rather than having to 'just do it' and being able to reshoot certain parts if needed a lot easier. Problems can arise at the last second but it's just knowing that it isn't the end of the world or knowing that it can be easily tackled if you hold onto that drive to keep going with the project is that you need. The same message the film sends out.
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