Mud Mud Glorious Mud

Well not the title I thought I would be using for my first blog for the second Big Book Media film shoot in Morocco but given that I have been the wettest today that I have ever been in my life it is definitely the most appropriate! James here (Big Book Media Production Assistant - photo of me on the left with clapper board) blogging and trying to dry out after a wet day in the desert!

As well as getting soaked through I am also as red as a lobster, so have managed to get both soaking wet and sunburnt all on one day - I've done well! We got caught in two monsoons while shooting today - we spent all day jumping over rivers of rain working their way through the once dusty now muddy landscape and sheltering under trees when the rain got really heavy to try keep out of it a little bit (not that it worked really as we all still got soaking!). The photos above are Ouzazate and the mud before the rain and on the right hand photo rain clouds gathering above our team!

The weather put filming behind a bit so we had a quick ten min lunch and then Deane our DTI guy, Charlie and myself put together a second unit for filming to go out and re film an earlier scene which needed a re-doing. While the first unit carried on shooting through today's script. It came out really well.
The children who are amongst the extras on set seem to be having great fun - the donkeys and pigs however not so much! Yet again whoever was responsible for casting the donkeys has given us another set of absolute Divas, they are terrible at taking direction from David (our Director!) and are making the usual outrageous demands (fresh lillys and all white scented candles in their dressing trailers - the usual diva stuff!). As for the pigs, well, it took ten guys six hours to catch them and there has been a lot of infighting so Charlie has had to have words with them all and threaten the end of their contract with us if there are anymore problems on the rest of the shoot. The photo above is of some of our Moroccan crew with all the pigs finally in a cart being moved to the set.

All in all I had a great first day, and even though everyone got very wet and muddy spirits are high and the footage looks great. My last photo shows Kathy our photographer's foot covered in mud having taken off her shoe at the end of the day!
I will e-mail again tomorrow with more shoot tales but for now I desperately need to wash off my days mud and get ready for a potential lot more tomorrow!