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!

Joe Le Taxi

Hi, my name is Vicky and I am the Production Accountant on the Big Book Media shoot in Morocco. The rest of the team have gone down to Tamougalt to shoot there and I have stayed behind to work on the books, have got plenty to catch up on while it's nice and quiet here.
Charlie the Production Manager rang me today with some jobs to do, It's never quiet for long! I went out with a very helpful taxi driver to run the errands, he spoke no English and very little French so my business French qualification wasn't loads of use for this!! However he was really helpful and went into all the shops with me that I had to go to and helped with the items I needed to get. The roads are really empty here, so it looks fun to drive as there aren't many rules! My sun visor needed adjusting at one point so my driver lent over to do it and drove straight over the other side of the road then back again!

Our first stop on the errands run was Royal Air Maroc where we had to pay for 6 flights for actors who were travelling down for our shoot from Casablanca.

We were then going on to a computer shop to get a lead to connect a PC to a MAC. Neither my taxi driver nor the person at Air Maroc had heard of the shop that we had been told could sell us one of these so Charlie explained over the phone where the shop was to the Air Maroc assistant who translated the information to my taxi driver and we set off!! We still had some trouble finding it but my driver shouted out to all the shops we saw on our way for directions until we finally got there!
One last phone call with Charlie trying to explain to the assistant in the computer shop exactly what we needed and we set off with the lead - hoping it was the right one.
On the way back to Ouzarzazte there was a man in the road who had just dropped a huge watermelon up ahead of us, so we had a man and large red splat of fruit to swerve round which my driver did easily! Then we carried on back to my hotel.

I am staying in a truly lovely hotel called Le Berber Palace in Ouzarzazate
http://www.ouarzazate.com/leberberepalace/
In these pictures you can see the pool lit up at night and the outside of the building - it really was a palace.
My room is a suite with living room so I have the Big Book Media Shoot Office set up there so that Charlie and myself can work on the production admin there.

That's all from me for today.