Oliwia

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Whilst Bless You! was always at the forefront of my mind this semester, I wanted to help out on as many other shoots as I could, especially in ACing as I always have a lot of fun doing that.

I was 1st AC on 5/6 days of Wuthered, which was a lot of fun - the crew and locations were great and there was some variety in shots etc that were fun to work on.

I also filled in for a day as 1st AC on both Adeline and On The Backburner, and both of those were an absolute pleasure, and if it weren't for other commitments I would had loved to help more.

My work on Antyeshti, as the screenwriter, mostly finished over the Christmas break when we locked the script before coming back for this semester, besides contributing to and sharing the crowdfunder and casting calls on social media. I was super eager to see any snippet of the film and when Davide asked me to see the edit along with Kushal and Max, I was blown away. This is the first time I have seen a script I have written come to life, and whilst the final product of course bears some differences, so much of it, especially visually, is what I had imagined while writing, especially the past parts shot in India. There was some uncertainty about how the film should end as the written ending did not play out well in the edit due to a few elements, so I'm so excited to see how it ends and hear it with sound design!

Scenes 5-7

Scenes 1-4

I got up early a couple of mornings to see exactly how the sky will look at any time of the morning.

After finding our location, I got the sun position on Sun Tracker.

Our instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blessyou.film?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==

Our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61569676594422

Our link tree: https://linktr.ee/blessyou.film?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaZ31Scp15yuPc68uBSJhvgoQybOiO4Xz71TEK35FERhfc3a8t-kGBDvOP0_aem_Q6o_t_rAHChmnSYc-YYA2Q

Our crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/blessyoufilm

This was something. With a 80 slide post and 18 slide story project on Canva, it was something. Me and Francis also edited reels for the socials and got Monica in third year to edit our main crowdfunding video which was a massive help.

I scripted the video which we filmed on what seemed to be the coldest day of the year during which we were ambushed by high school boys. Anyways, along with the questions for the video above, I wrote in a few more questions that the answers to which we edited into reels for extra content during our campaign.

Setting up and running the Facebook and instagram was truly a full time job. I made the posts and me, Francis or Mara would post them. We tried keeping up engagement with stories, commenting on other pages and daily posts during our campaign.

I kicked off festival research super early as I knew it was better to do during post rather than after to make sure every box is ticked. I made a spreadsheet and found just over 30 festivals before joining forces with Francis and with Mara's help adding to this list, organising all necessary materials and deciding which ones to submit to.

My criteria when selecting festivals for this list would be

what are their categories? which of these work in our favour most

what is their max duration for shorts (aka how many submissions could they get)

what do they qualify for

what are they looking for? check past winners and social media

do they have rules such as premiere policies that clash with other submissions

Francis made our filmfreeway account. Hayley made the poster, Molly made the trailer, and me and Francis made the EPK.

We've decided to apply to around 20 of various statuses and submission prices. I knew going into it that my goal with these festivals is to network, meet people and get our names out there and realistically speaking, that is more useful locally than otherwise.

This was the most fun I ever had during post! I was pretty nervous going into it as I knew from the beginning that I would be scheduling it as Francis would need that time off for Bowl and Mara was busy with other things. Therefore, I made a post groupchat and schedule that I ran past everyone. I kept a to-do list next to it too. I handled credits and the transcription for translations and pulled in some extra helping hands for the poster and translations etc.

I got in touch with Kasia through another Napier music student. She had done our title music for the test shoot and I knew I'd want her to work on the final film too. Me and Saoirse met first and marked a script up with all of places we thought score would be appropriate and what tone we wanted for it. We wanted the score to be intentional, sparing enough and work with the sound design.

I made a milanote with a bunch of references and we met once she had begun playing with some stuff so we could talk through it.

This was quite something. Not knowing where we would be shooting, with what cast and what crew at what times until a few days before was not super helpful in scheduling our shoot. Saskia, the absolute trooper organised a full HOD meeting and hours and years and decades with me, scheduling everything around every obstacle and sudden change. We had so many on-set changes too realising shots didn't work with the locations etc which was a massive shame but I knew from the beginning that this was a massive possibility and I was very ruthless with cutting whatever was not necessary and slowing us down too much. There was unfortunately a lot of late nights and calls scheduling the following days due to these changes - none of this would have been possible without Joseph and Saskia being the absolute legends they are of course.

Saskia was a massive help from the beginning, our very first meeting with her, Francis and Mara was great - one of my favourite suggestions from her was to get notes from Molly to our second AC about camera notes. We did the same for Mark-ant, our script sup.

We knew from the beginning that the surgery scene would require a lot of practice in a lot of different areas.

With so many characters in the scene, all standing around a bed that could break the line, lots of movement and chaos, blood and the removal of the habit, we knew we'd have to practice every move, especially as there were an array of medical equipment and fragile production design involved.

We first did a blocking and blood test shoot along with Joseph and Cara. Following our shotlist, we got stills and videos of each shot we planned to gauge the technicalities and we had Keri, Francis and Hayley act for us.

We also got to test the blood splurt with the water pressure hose that Cara got (only with water). We wanted to know how best to light and position it for it to be seen clearly, how many times we had to pump the tank for it to reach the height we wanted and what way to angle it for it to not splatter everywhere.

This is us testing the colour and consistency before the actual scene on set with blood!

Another thing we tested for scene 5 was the costume logistics! For one, Saoirse wanted to mic through the habits, which we tested at my expense. It took a while to figure out a positioning that didn't cause a rustle and in the end it ended up on the forehead under the veil.

This meant that we also had to figure out how to rip the habit off in one swift motion that wouldn't remove the very bottom layer as we didn't like the look without it. I practiced a few different ways and landed on a pretty good one, we also tested how tight the ties had to be to achieve this which was really useful. Saoirse also got to test where to put the mic for any scenes without the habit.

I had such an amazing time working with Joseph from the very beginning. We would meet for hours and plan the shotlist together and scribble over our scripts and Joseph would then input all of our ramblings into really easy to read documents.

We talked about getting anamorphic lenses at the beginning but decided that we could achieve a lot of the desired effects ourselves and could probably use the money elsewhere. I did a bunch of research and got some references together and Joseph met with lecturers about it which was really helpful in making our decision.

Floorplans came super handy in camera and lighting plans. We were in constant contact with Cara too, with our groupchat so that we were all on the same page. At every recee, we tried to follow the shotlist with our photos and even recorded some shots to practice blocking in the space.

This was a tricky one! We didn't secure locations until a couple of days before shooting which was pretty mental for the whole crew. I was making and re-making floorplans up until the day, Joseph's camera and lighting plans were constantly changing and Cara planned for and bought stuff for twice as many locations as what she should have. It was tough on everyone as Francis couldn't tell cast and crew location info until the last moment either. But after cold emailing and phoning, letter dropping, posting on socials and scouring google maps street view, we pulled through and had some cool recces in the progress too!

I made a locations moodboard which helped our outreach too as it condensed everything we needed into a few slides. I was able to send it to some post-grads etc to see if they had shot in similar locations for example.

We had 7 recees in total, including a lovely daytrip in Culross which doubled up as a morale booster for the team.

With how useful the first test shoot had been, we wanted to test as many things are possible. Joseph organised a lighting test with David Byrne and we had Alex McNeil help us out too. We tested how to make all lighting in an exterior night scene motivated by the moon and the lantern held by the nuns.

Using a steamed up glass bottle with a light taped to it, Joseph had me walk with it and tried various things with the lights such as the distance and spill of the moonlight and tracking a larger orange light with the lantern.

In our film, we ended up using a lantern which had that same tiny LED inside of it set to a yellower tone of orange. We only used a real candle during close ups and the effect worked great. Just like in this lighting test, Joseph and Alex Caldow, our gaffer, would set up a larger cold light to spill onto wherever we were filming whilst the characters held the LED lanterns that were boosted by larger warm lights coming from the direction the lantern would (in the example on the bottom, for one, there is a warm tube light on the ground by their feet). We also benefitted from having windows in the backgrounds of our exterior sets which we lit up with 'candlelight'.

Cara did an amazing job in organising every single detail of the production design for our film. She kept a super organised Milanote and would let me know when there was stuff to look at or pick from.

I had a look through the test shoot and put some thoughts together:

For the costume, we realised that hiring was not a very viable option due to the use of fake blood and buying good quality costumes was out of the question for our budget. We got in touch with a friend and costume designer, Ché Ross-Hook, and began to collect inspiration on costumes. He found a pattern and we bought the fabrics. We then selected some beads and charms for the rosaries which Cara made. I had never worked with a costume designer before so it was a really interesting process.

Ché delivered the costumes and showed us how to put all the pieces together which we recorded every step of.

As I made blocking floorplans, Cara was able to add placement of furniture and props based on our discussions. This was really useful for Joseph's camera and lighting floorplans. We looked through hundreds of lamps, medical equipment, chairs, tables, blankets etc etc. With every location change, we had the job of having to figure out how to cover up any modern fixtures in every new location too. I say we however Cara absolutely took charge here and made sure that every single box was checked.

On set, Cara's vision came to life. We had set up days for both locations which I'm so grateful for as it made all of the difference. In Preston Hall for example, we were using the family's basement wine cellar for the bedchamber which we spent hours cleaning out and cleaning before Cara could even get started.

The transformation was really something.

Casting for Bless You! was a really great process. Francis took charge of it and made casting calls that were posted to instagram, Facebook groups and Starnow. Francis complied all responses into a table with name, role, age, contact, a link to a showreel and a brief opinion. I also reached out to some actors I had seen online that I thought could fit the role.

I went through each person and selected a few people to have an informal online call with. On these calls, I would have asked the actor to read the script before the call so that we could chat about the story and characters. There was no line reading - I only wanted to test believability and their understanding of the story. We chatted about backstrories and themes and I had some really brilliant conversations. We then invited a few people for each role to an in-person group audition along with Francis and Keri. We did two sets of Myrtle, Hildy, Agnes and some doubles too. Keri even wrote a one page script for auditioning Hildys and Doctors together which was super helpful along with lots of improv!

The auditions were a lot of fun, we had around 9 groups altogether and we got some really brilliant feedback from the actors about how enjoyable they found the process which was really nice too. I will definitely be sticking to group auditions from now on! I found that they created a much more fun and relaxed atmosphere and meant that the actors had each other to bounce off of. It also meant that our auditions served as a a first rehearsal too which was really great as it showed how well certain people worked with each other and how responsive people were to direction etc.

In the end, we had the most incredible cast. Most of the people we had such immediate gut feelings about too, so we were super lucky. We got an online table read in a week or so before the shoot where everyone got to meet each other too.

We managed to get a full cast dress rehearsal a couple of days before shooting which was really useful. Cara helped them get into costume and made all the necessary adjustments and lent me all the props necessary for blocking etc. I also rearranged the desk and chairs in the room so that we could practice blocking which was really useful when it came to set.