I am up to my eyeballs once again in projects, this fortnight a big new one is a film making bootcamp by the Media Resource Centre and the Mental Health Coalition/Mindshare. I am stoked to be involved, we are learning how to make a short film from start to finish – scripting, filming, all the way through to post production editing. I am in a small group with three other people learning and one experienced filmmaker facilitating. We were assigned the topic of “Community” from the perspective of mental health, and have to make a short film, about 4 minutes in length.

On Tuesday we met up to work on our script, listen to some free music we can use as a soundtrack, and learn a bit about the camera we will be shooting with. Our story has a lot of close up shots in it, so we will be shooting with a digital SLR with an amazing macro lens. I am very excited about it!! The only downside – and unfortunately for me it is a big one, is that the five days overlaps with group time, so I’ll have to miss out here and there, and also that they start early in the morning, in the city with no easy parking available. So I’ve been turning up pretty shattered and not having very much to offer until after midday when my brain starts to wake up. Next week for me is simply horrendous with every day packed full and I am dreading it already even though a lot of things are fun things I’m looking forward to. I wish I could get to sleep at a reasonable hour! I’ve been working on it a lot and I’ve been able to bring it back from about 5.30am to about 3.30am, but that still makes a 7am start pretty rough going. I’m also trying really hard to keep three meals a day happening, but that’s not always the case either. The week after this bootcamp finishes I’m going to spend a lot of time sleeping!

See the film we made here.