After the first days of any shoot, which are inevitably chaotic, every production office finds its own rhythms. This is happening now at Your Big Break, as the production team becomes accustomed to the challenge of working with five different directors on five different projects, all in either production or preproduction.

Tim McLachlan’s Frosty Man and the BMX Kid has wrapped (more on that soon – Tim has already left the building en route to Park Road Post Production in Wellington, and I’m hoping to check in with him there sometime in the next few days); Something Special starts shooting tomorrow, and then Kristi Simkins will have her two days in the hot seat.

Aya emerges from the meeting room after a chat with Barrie Osborne, who has been talking each of the finalists through their scripts. Aya has mostly recovered from a reaction she had yesterday to some unknown allergen in a field, and seems ready to dive in; the time for ‘chillaxing’, to use one of Aya’s favourite words, is clearly at an end.

I also sat down with Kristi, who is run off her feet in preparation for tomorrow’s shoot – but seems calm and collected and getting her head around some of the technical challenges ahead (though she did admit to freaking out “on the inside”). “The biggest decision we made was to shoot using Steadicam,” Kristi said. A body-mounted rig that allows the operator to shoot incredibly smooth hand-held footage, the Steadicam has been used by the masters to create stunning continuous shots (anyone remember the nightclub entrance scene in Scorsese’s Goodfellas?); while Kristi isn’t planning on any seamless extravaganzas, she’s hoping the Steadicam will give Something Special a filmmaking majesty to match its scenery. One of these discoveries has been a defunct tourist-spot, now disused but with stunning waterfalls and overgrown gardens – and she’s counting on Simon Riera, her Director of Photography, to help her bring this all to life.

But plans change – a follow-up email from Kristi lets me know that the waterfall location has since been scrapped: “Turns out most of the plant life around it is not native,” Kristi says, “and we couldn’t do some of the shots we wanted to do.” So some last-minute location scouting will now be in order to find a suitable replacement. Last-minute location changes, for whatever reason, are expected on any film shoot – and it’s up to the filmmaker and the crew to adapt, sometimes at very short notice!

In the meantime, the production team are still wrestling – successfully I might add – with the demands of readying the remaining Your Big Break shoots in record time. “It’s like prepping five major commercials shoots, all of which were approved at the last minute,” I heard someone in the production office say yesterday. There’s an air of intense determination in the office – tempered with flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants urgency. It’s all coming together – and just as quickly, it’s all going to be over.

I sat down with Barrie yesterday for a chat about the Your Big Break concept, the judging process and what he thought of the entries – stand by for that tomorrow! And send good luck thoughts Kristi’s way tonight – tomorrow, she’s rolling those RED ONE cameras on Something Special …

– Your Big Break Critic