Breakfast At Ouzarzate

Hi Maddy here, I have just started working in the Big Book offices as their office assistant helping out with all sorts of tasks - so far today I have proof read the invites for the Big Book Launch Party which is in November, been looking at glass hire, display board hire and other things needed for the party. I've also been helping get a lacie drive and a transmitter for a microphone from Richmond Film - both need to make it to Hannah who is flying out to Morocco at 6pm this evening. Finally I am writing today's blog!

James our Production Assistant sent an e-mail to us yesterday, with a little bit of their pre shoot info, James, Charlie and the rest of the team flew out to Morocco on Friday and have had a couple of days prep in Ouzazate before filming which starts tomorrow. Yesterday James was with Mike Fowlie Art Director (photo on the left of Mike) and got to dance on a giant stage in Atlas Studios where Mike was building our Egyptian set for the shoot.


Then James was out in the dessert with the film crew who were doing their GVs for the shoot (general views) getting ready to start filming today (photo above right of David and a couple of our crew out planning their shots in the desert). He says that David our Director is one of the fastest people he has ever met and he was trying to keep up with him all afternoon out in the sands!James has seen his first dead snake (photo right!) and a lot of animal bones in the dry dusty sands.

Today here in the office Liz, Alec and Robbie's day has been spent trying to get a forgotten lacy drive and a mic transmitter out to the shoot. Neither of these tasks has gone smoothly as that would make life far too simple! Our courier picking up the lacy drive for us from Blackboys in East Sussex, went awol for quite some time and took several hours to do an hour and a half journey and the transmitter isn't quite at Alec's home address yet where Amory is waiting for it. Robbie is now on the train to Clapham Junc with the lacie drive where he will meet Alec, Alec is on his way to his house in his car where he will pick up the transmitter, then will drive to meet Robbie and then drive to the airport with both to meet Hannah who is flying out this evening. It also looked for one horrible moment like Hannah's flight booking had an error in the name but after a panicked call to Air Maroc this was not the case - so a lot of e-mails, texts and phone calls later it looks like this might all actually work out and we might get Hannah on the plane with the lacie and the transmitter on the way to Morocco.The photo to the left is of Robbie before he set of on the train for Clapham with our Lacie.

The next blog will be coming from James's first shoot day in Ouzazate.

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.

Four Beautiful Christmas Cards

Today my blog covers the Big Book Media Christmas cards which we are producing with a company based in Hove. We have chosen four photos that Katy took during Shoot One for Big Book Media and the card company have turned our lovely photos into really beautiful cards. They have added text and gold foil and we think the end result is going to be a very desirable box of Christmas Cards! I have put the four photos into this blog with the copy that appears on the card with over the photo. There is also some design work done on our photos for example in the photo below a night sky has been added as we filmed the Three Kings travelling over the desert during the day.


'And behold, the star they had seen in the East went before them' (night sky being added!)




The cards are going to be produced in a gift box with gold foil to highlight the text that goes over the images. We have approved the final artwork today so I will have samples ready to send out shortly. We will receive the final boxed cards sets in two weeks time - can't wait to see them!


'She wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger'





The cards will be put on our website when the full website goes live at the beginning of November.
I am going to work on a document this week showing the final artworked cards that I can send out to shops to give a flavour of the product before the samples are ready to go out. I am going to put the final artwork up in a blog shortly so I hope you also think that they are lovely!

'There were shepherds out in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night'





We also have all of our Three Wise Camel designs now so I will post those for you too so you can see the final Noah, Becky and Zac. Guy our graphic designer is now working on Sunday school packs to support advent for this December.

'They offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh'





This afternoon Hannah - Producer, David - Director, Tim - Editor, Amory - Post Production Manager, Alec - Sales and Marketing Manger (new to the team will blog about that soon too!) and Jay from Fruit Media (who have offices in the same building as Big Book) went to a church near the Big Book Media offices to look at our footage on a large screen to see what it looks like in situ. So will hopefully hear all about that and more tomorrow.

We are also in Pre Production for The Bible Project Shoot Two - Charlie and James working hard on getting everything set up for Morocco for the 19th October. So the office is very busy but no change there!

So my next update on all things post shortly hotly followed by the next shoot blog!!

Three Wise Camels

Today's blog is about our Three Wise Camels work! These are going to be 3 characters that will illustrate the childrens Sunday school packs we are writing, there will also be a logo of the Three Wise Camels design.
The pictures above are a few out of a set of picture's that Hannah (our Producer) Sunday School children drew for us, they attend the Sunday School at St Augustine's Church, Wembley Park, London.

Guy Passey who is a local Brighton illustrator and Graphic Artist is in the process of designing our camels and logo for us and I have attached a couple of illustrations from him that show him working on our camel designs - the final camels will be with us on Thursday!
We have named our camels Zac, Becky and Noah and each camel will illustrate the different age groups that the Sunday Schools have groups for. We are working on packs that Sunday School teachers can order from us with activities to do each week, the activity packs will have stories, craft activities, games etc.. and there will be packs with different activities aimed at each age range with the appropriate camel to give instructions to follow through the pack!

These sketches show Becky and the left and Zac on the right and are Guy's drafts for each character. Zac is going to be the camel that represents the oldest age group for Sunday Schools, Becky will represent the middle age group and Noah will represent the youngest age group.

We have a big meeting in the office tomorrow and Guy is coming along with the final camel designs. We also have James coming along who is going to be our Production Assistant for our prep weeks for Shoot Two in Morocco and will work out on the shoot too. He has worked with Charlie our Production Manager previously and fancies repeating the experience!

Next blog Christmas Cards - Shepherds, Wise Men, Gold and Manger so until then ...

Two Churches and a Pub Lunch

Hi, Liz here with a blog on a shoot that we did on Tuesday here in Brighton where our office is. We shot in two churches - one traditional and one modern. We shot a congregation of extras - watching our filmed footage on a big screen. I have included stills images taken from the filmed footage that Tim our Editor has given me. The one on the left is our first church and is the traditional one.

For the shoot Deane our DTI guy came down from Abbingdon with his red camera and smoke machine (which he loves! - it softens the light in the churches) the lighting was provided by Tamplins Stage Lighting Design and Rental and the sound by Mick Greenwood - Freelance Sound Recording and Music Production. Then as per the rest of our filming David was directing the shoot and Hannah was producing it.

The shoot went really well and although we had to get to the first church at 8.30 am to set up, the actual shooting only took about 15/20 minutes and all went really smoothly. Father Gareth Jones was our Reverend in the first church and is the Assistant Curate at the Church (St Paul's in West Street, Brighton). Our extras arrived at 10am and we completed the bit of film we needed in what seemed like only a couple of takes, we set off to get coffee and pastries in the function room of church two and relaxed for a bit while shoot one was taken down and shoot two was set up. My son was an extra as was Charlie's son and his friend - so see if you can spot the back of my son's head he's 2 and a half - once we have put the filmed footage up on our website - we sat him on 3 cushions so you could see him over the back of the pew! We had a good hour break before shoot two happened at 12.00. The second shoot was in the modern church and took slightly longer than the first as we filmed Reverend Trevor Critchlow reading from one of the gospels we have filmed while the footage was playing behind him. We still only did a few takes, some with readings and some without before we all headed up to The Open House pub for a lovely lunch. We had some really tasty food - I personally had a fantastic halloumi and roasted vegtable salad and Alexander who sat with me and my son had a really good looking steak sandwhich!
Then the shoot day was over and after a quick pop past the office for our team (the extras were allowed off at this point!) the day was done.

The picture below is a screen shot of Rev Trevor Critchlow in the modern church:
The filmed footage is going to go up on website to show how the films we are making can be used in churches. We are doing a lot of work for the website at the moment and I will write about that another time!

Thanks for reading.

Liz

One Shoot Ends And Another Begins

Hi all, Liz here in the Big Book Media office with a concluding blog from our first shoot.
Charlie (Production Manager), Vicky (Production Accountant) and I are meeting this evening to go over the actuals from the budget for BBM Production One and get the final cost of the shoot!!! Hopefully none of us will suffer an actual heart attack when we total it all - I might have a first aider on stand by just in case!!!

Everyone has returned home safely from the first Big Book Media shoot and has time to recover before the second shoot which we are planning for mid October 2009.
Deane and Charlie arrived back at the Big Book offices last week in their desert wear looking exhausted (Charlie especially!!) and with tons of camera equipment in Deane's Landrover. Deane left Charlie with me and then drove off home with his red camera and other gear. The lenses and filters we hired went to Pinewood and were collected by London Filter Co, Take Two, Richmond etc..

The shoot lasted a total of two weeks in the intense summer heat of nearly 50 degrees out in the desert - hopefully the temperature will have dropped a bit by mid October so it won't be so sweaty! We had a camera fan melt at one point on the shoot!!
Various of the team are having a holiday to get over the shoot!! David our director is in the south of France, Tim our editor is in Croatia, Deane, DTI Technician had a few days rest in the Oxfordshire countryside and Robin, Focus Puller went away to Scotland straight from Marrakesh! Charlie our Production Manager hasn't gone away she is just enjoying getting some sleep in a bed which is rest enough for her!!

Charlie has been back to work in our office in Brighton and has started planning the next production
'The Bible Project Shoot Two' which is scheduled in for 19th October (at the moment).
We are just planning our recce trip first to check locations, then we can get fully organised for this next shoot. David (Director) and Trevor (Consultant) are going to go out the first week of September to check out the east of Morocco - Essaouiia Region to make sure the places we are planning to shoot are right and then Mike (Art Dept) is going to go to those locations and start his set, costume and props planning.

Hannah (Producer) and Amory (Music and Post Production) are coming down to the office tomorrow to get some work done on our post production projects - Promo, Cards, Demos, Readings etc.. I'll blog again after that meeting with an update on what we cover.

Until then.....

Heat & Dust

Hi, Katy blogging today with a little bit of shoot news.
We have had a delayed day on the shoot due to problems with our line producer, everyone else in the team has worked so hard and the riggers continued to work to make sure everything was ready for when we could start shooting again.

The UK and Moroccan teams out here have worked solidly to make the production happen and all the gaffers, props teams, make up, sound crew out here have been amazing and we hope we can work with them again. If we could just have had a different Line Producer (in fact no line producer would have been an improvement) things would have run a lot more smoothly.

Selva has been great as our Jesus and we have been filming his scenes for the past couple of days. He travelled out here with Trevor who is one of our Big Book Media consultants for the filming - they have a very intense schedule as they are only out here for a few days.
The temperatures out here are 45 degrees plus which makes it so hard to keep going, the heat midday is unbearable! As I said in my first blog we are doing two shoots a day - the first one in the morning and then the second later on in the day once the temperature has dropped a bit. Though it doesn't seem to drop that much!

I actually managed to have a wander last night in town to the souk with Gemma and Vicky, it was lovely to see some more of Morocco and not just our film sets! Gemma is one of our runners on the shoot, it was her last night as she flies home tomorrow so it was nice to get a chance to do some sight seeing.

(souk picture)

While on the set I have ended up as the first aider handing out immodium! and treating bee stings, headaches and cuts. I helped out when our Judas broke his ankle - though that did need more medical help than I could provide. A plaster stuck on his leg wouldn't quite have fixed that one!

That's all for now. Katy.