Monotony

There's very little to say about today, really. It's been a horrible, rainy, windy day and I've been holed-up in the sitting room, planning shots for the White City project. I would dearly love longer to get my head around things, and in many cases there's little I can plan because we've no idea whether we're allowed to film in the locations we've requested. 

Some people, specifically the people who own the ground underneath the West Way, are trying to fleece us out of wild sums of money. They seem to want to charge us for the locations on top of a generic "filming fee" which is an hourly rate. If they don't recognise the low budget nature of our film, we'll simply not be able to film there. If we do end up paying their extortionate filming fee, I shall make sure whichever "official" person who comes to the shoot with the intent of holding a clip board and looking bored in a corner somewhere, is given a little task; cable-basing or dolly-gripping. That sort of thing. It's all hands on deck on my shoots, and if this person is costing us £87 per hour, they're surely a film expert with all sorts of knowledge, right?

I should say that Queen's Park Rangers FC are allowing us to film in their grounds free of charge... So by no means is everyone being unreasonable. 

I think there's a tendency for some people to hear the word BBC and go "kerching!" It's a very distasteful response, particularly if your organisation also receives public funding.

That said, the BBC is rather well known for its ability to fleece itself. Different branches of the BBC happily charge each other huge sums of money for services rendered. On more than one occasion, I've been forced to bring a freelance cameraman or editor onto a BBC project because I can't afford an in-house one! This often works in my favour; the in-house editors in particular are highly unionised and clock off with absolute precision, so one tends to get more work and, more crucially, better grace from people who haven't spent a life-time whinging, getting bored, and doing just enough work to get by. 

That said, my two favourite camera men in the world, both called Keith as it happens, are BBC staff.

It's 9pm and I'm breaking the monotony of the day by coming to Sainsburys in Muswell Hill. I'm finding the harsh halogen lights in here rather disturbing however, so might find myself making a run for it. A supermarket is no place to blog. I keep tripping over.