So, its about the 23rd of July, where do the days go?

Its been a funny old couple of weeks, I'm still hobbling around on my crutch post - knee op, which is fairly annoying and the people of London still completely fail to get out of my way or offer me a seat on the bus or tube but then I never really expected that they would!

Last week I spent 4 days working as a 1st Assistant Director on a student film at shepperton studios funded by LCC (london college of communications) where I am doing my Masters and Skillset who give people in the film industry money to do stuff for some reason.

It was a fantastic set, the art department had really done a fine job, and each department had a Mentor from the industry, most of whom had been in the industry for at least 20 or 30 years and worked on everything you could think of, from Star Wars to Harry Potter to Gladiator.

Sadly however the Director and his side kick the Director of photography were possibly the two most arrogant and ignorant people I have ever met. They had done no prep as far as I could tell, and had absolutly no idea how to shoot a film. It was like being on a photographic set, each shot was totally different to the last, no continuity opf lighting, atmos or even performance.

The director hadnt even decided what genre it was and he had already started shooting.

They consistantly ignored all advice and comments from the mentors and continued to behave like they were shooting Godfather 4.

The budget was £100K and they pissed it all away.

On day three the shot list was M/S (medium shots) all day long. Nothing else. It was like the director hadnt even thought about what it was that he was going to do.

He kept waving about his own script which had some scribbles on, but never showed them to anyone else and never made any copies.

His notes were in coloured pen, and he said I like to think in colour. Well. That's lucky, then itsn't it?

It was amazing to me, who would kill to have such an opportunity, that the Dir hadn't bebothered to learn quite simply, anything about directing at all.

His direction to the actors was laughable, but one of the actors was taking it very seriously, and I just thought, Oh dear you're a bit of an arse arn't you. His loss.

One wondered what they get taught at school. Tch, kids these days.

~

Tonigfht was the opening night of the Rushes Soho Film Festival where I have a film playing in competition - The Gravity of Belief, so I was invited to the opening booze up which was at the old GLC building behind the london Eye.

It's now a film museam so I got to rub shoulders with daleks, darth vader, Boba Fett, and so on, quite fun really. Lots of the usual faces at london film things.