1. The Story.

2. Public Relations.

3. A Happy Associate.

4. Sound Effects.

5. Actor Search.

6. Budget.

1. The Story.

Weekend warrior is a little fantasy piece that was thought up, whilst I was spending too much time on the PC playing Soldier Of Fortune game, relaxing from hectic filming and editing schedule.  Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it!   The idea was that the character, having played too much of this 3d game was beginning to have difficulty telling the difference between what was real and what was not. 
Any similarities between the short story and current world leaders are drawn at your own conclusions.   But obviously the similarity exists to a comical extent when you watch the short, and after having to go through recent events in the Middle East and the manufactured war and its reasons there.  Am I the one having problems separating fact from fiction? Well maybe not but whom is?

2. Public Relations.

When we shot one of our other shorts "The Return of Monica" Where had to contact the police and tell them about the use of a blank firing weapon, and when and where we would be using it.  This was indoors and only a few people would see it, but it was legally necessary, and helpful in case say for instance through a window anyone had seen the gun being brandished.  Anyway during weekend warrior we were planning to use 3 plastic guns without even plastic ammunition, and had to travel 2 miles out of our way to see the local police and actually show them the guns.  Though this was an inconvenience as it entailed us taking 3 buses to get there, it was necessary, because if anyone had seen us running around the woods with guns they would have been on the phone to the police immediately.    Also standing where you can be seen with the camera would obviously be helpful in diffusing any fear of any passers by.

3. A Happy Associate.

Being the massive John Woo fan that he is, Martainn had been dying to run around with guns in one of our films since we had began this venture.  So on this film he was quite happy to be running through the woods, in camouflage gear, with a machine gun and two pistols to hand.   He was a bit miffed though at the fact that the weapons were plastic and wouldn't be firing any blanks.  Though I did convince him that once I dub all the sound effects onto it, it would look cool.  Which, well it did, not perfect but damn good enough for a first try.

4. Sound Effects.

The sound effects for the movie were taken from the actual Soldier Of Fortune game, which I hope they don't sue me for as its some free advertising for them.  The laying over of the gun effects was not as easy as was originally thought.  It took quite a bit of time to actually lay the gunshots and other noises over where they were supposed to be.  So we probably shot in the woods for about 2 or 3 hours, and editing the film and putting over the sound effects probably took around 8 hours or so.  Which I guess for the first time of actually having to put effects in a specific place, rather than wherever you want, was an acceptable amount of editing time for this 5 minute short.

5. Actor Search.

During this year of filming we had to look for some more actors to be in our films which were now stories involving more people.  During this search we were lucky to find Mairi Beaver for this and some of our other short films.  Mairi was an experienced theatre actress, not quite of the age of an actress that we had in mind, but the fact that she is such a talented actor made us ignore the age difference.  At the time of this movie, we also found some other very talented stage actors who were willing to work with us for nothing, each of them giving great performances almost every time meaning we only had to do one or two takes.   Some of them are still working with us, and some like Mairi have moved onto more prominent roles in theatre productions.   To all of them we will be eternally grateful, and hope that we can keep working together in the future (hopefully with all of us getting paid for it!) as well as hoping that all of them move onto more prominent work worthy of their great talents.

Top Of Page.

6. Budget.

• Bus fares around 5 Quid (UK)
• Food around 10 Quid (UK)
• Money to bribe officials to let us run around in the woods with plastic weapons Priceless.  (Joke, no officials were bribed or coerced, in the making of this film, and no blades of grass were intentionally harmed).

Until next time, take it easy
Giovanni Pistachio.

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