Hi all,

Just a real quick blog update. Preproduction Day 4 has been all about bringing it all together and finalizing our ideas.  My DOP – Rewa Harre – finally flew in and joined the crew and we all packed back into Dorris’s car and went for a second climb up to Lake Alta.  Turns out that Rewa may have some mountain goat in his blood because he and our Locations Manager decided to climb up both mountain ridges overlooking Lake Alta to do a quick recce and snap off a few photos to pick out some filming angles.  The view up there is stunning, though we probably won’t be able to climb up with our gear on the day … so that means a short hop in the chopper to get up there and knock off a few scenes!

This was then followed by an extensive walk-and-talk between myself, my 1st AD, my DOP and the Locations/Safety dept. as we mapped out exactly where we’d be shooting what actions, and what kind of gear we’d need for it.  Along the way we also enjoyed the beautiful light refracting off the clear, turquoise water and Dorris regaled me with some anecdotes from The Lord of the Rings, King Kong and 10,000 B.C. which was awesome (especially for me – I LOVE film set stories, they’re always mind-breakingly funny or tragic).

Our scout over, we packed up and headed off to visit Ken Turner, our master art director, at his awesome house just out of town.  There he gave me a variety of options on inflatable rafts, backpacks and floating signs to examine and we ultimately made our choices which, hopefully, will give our lead character a whimsically funny and optimistic personality.  All-up there were very few issues to contend with art department-wise, and we all returned to the office at 8:30pm – exhausted but satisfied that things were finally coming together.

But my day wasn’t over!  Since Aya was flying out to Park Road in the morning and Andrés was in town and just starting his preproduction, we decided that this was the perfect time to get in some valuable R&R.  So Aya, Andrés, Aya’s lead actor Luke and myself all packed into a taxi and went for a night on the town in Queenstown – dinner, drinks and very engaging filmmaker discussion over pizza and pasta!  It was a great night and it was lovely to meet everyone properly and just have a night away from the office and from the stress of preproduction (or in Aya’s case, preparing for post!).

Well, that’s about it for me – today’s the last day of pre-prod and I’ve gotta go meet my lead actor who flies in today, make some final checks on costume and help out with organizing the order of shots we’ll shoot for the day.  The weather for my shoot day is pretty touch and go – if there are any weather gods in your culture, please pray to them for sunshine and not rain!

Fingers crossed and excited,

Rajneel