We Wish You a Merry Christmas

Hi all, Maddy here with a pre Christmas blog from the Big Book Media office. Our website has been up for just over a month now and the films are selling well, here in the UK as well as in the US. We are kind of winding down for Christmas except we have Big Book Media Shoot Three happening in Morocco from 2nd Jan so there will be lots of work to do before then to make sure all the crew and equipment get out there ready to film, the crew are mostly leaving on New Years Day!

We had our Big Book Media Christmas meal on Thursday night with the team from the Brighton office, we all went down to a tapas restaurant in the lanes in Brighton, it's called Casa Don Carlos and we had a really lovely meal, food was great, the atmosphere was too and we all enjoyed ourselves. As we were leaving it started to snow so we hurried to our homes to beat the downfall. David our Director said he really had to battle as he lives out past Heathfield and it was really falling hard as he got nearer home. Photo on the left our of our office windows of the snowy buildings on the street below the office!

Today the team was a bit depleted in the office as those of us living outside of Brighton couldn't travel in to work as there was a lot of snow in the night. I worked from home today - on this blog amongst other things!
Charlie, Liz, Tim and Robbie made it in and tied up work for the week. David was due to go up to London but had to abandon his car shortly after setting off as the snow was just too deep in deepest East Sussex! Alec, Amory and Hannah wondered what all the fuss was as they didn't have much snow in central London!!

We'll be in early next week to try and get as much done before the days off over Christmas and hopefully get Shoot Three all sorted and ready for the 2nd. Charlie has been working really hard to get everything finalised, she's been working with Huw who is going to go out on the shoot and look after production and also Sarah who is our new Production Accountant in the office.

Well that's it from me for now, next post will prob be from the shoot early Jan so until then hope you have a wonderful Christmas and 'speak' to you in the new year.

Maddy, photo of me on the left with Liz's son Jonny!

From Dusk Till Dawn (Production!)

We are currently finishing up our pre-production for Big Book Media's second shoot - the production team are flying out this Friday leaving the non production people here! Charlie our Production Manager and James our Production Assistant for this shoot have been working really hard with the planning of the shoot organising everything needed from our end, equipment, team, shipping, hotels, flights etc and liasing with Hamid in Morocco who is our Line Producer out there and is organising the Moroccan things needed for the shoot from his end. They have just a couple more days then they are off back to Ouzazate to start filming our next script.

I will be staying in the office again to manage anything that needs doing from here - hopefully a lot less than needed doing last time! Also in the office will be Tim who is completing some final post work on our filmed footage from Shoot One with Amory, they'll be spending most of their time up in London with Halo who are doing the final post stuff for us. Then Alec our Sales and Marketing Manager who has the building of the website to oversee, launch events for the first lot of films in Nov and about 100 other tasks to do. He will be here in the office with me and also Robbie who has just started working for us as Sales & Marketing Assistant - thank heavens he's here to help Alec there's a lot to do (there will be blogs to cover all of it)!

Shoot Two is going to last two weeks (the last two weeks of October) and we'll be back shooting in Ouzazate in the desert and a couple of nearby locations.
Deane, DTI came down in the week to bring over red camera equipment and accessories to be taken out via a shipping agent going out ahead of us to Morocco - Dynamic International Shipping. Left is Charlie's map of Morocco which is stuck up by her desk!

It has been the usual busy busy Production time in the office but James has been amazing and has made a huge difference to the production work load. I haven't had to get involved with shipping, lens orders, flights etc etc.. this time which has been wonderful! There are so many phone calls, e-mails and admin involved in getting a production off the ground, for the last shoot there were days I was on the phone arranging things from when I arrived in the morning to when I left at the end of the day!

The first thing I will be doing once the Production Team set off for Morocco is finalising our Launch event which is going to be at the beginning of November up in London. I'll blog about plans, plus more on 3 Wise Camels and Christmas Cards shortly.