James: After seven consecutive days of shooting the last thing you want to contend with are school children. But for the whole, the students were great. Olivia Corrie and Zak Lee enjoyed their short but concise parts. We had by this stage pretty much turned the ship around, and morale was high. I was really pissed that an element of complacency creeped in and the sound crew mixed down two stereo tracks live. It meant we had to re-shoot the scenes again, which, when you have 18 school children to entertain also, isn’t easy. But we managed.
Gabby: The weather was against us again that day. We were trying to shoot Mel and Sean’s scene down the alleyway but have to dive into a smokey little hole of a pub as the rain sets in. Eventually we get back to the alley and get the shot, but the wind is really strong and the audio is shocking. James did a really good job of fixing that in post.
James: It was hard to convince their drama teacher Melissa Dufty to take on the role of Mary.
Gabby: In fact it is not us who eventually persuades her it’s the kids themselves!
James: She reluctantly agrees and meets up with us at Gabby’s house to shoot the scene where Beth walks from Sean’s to Mel’s. Gab and I originally wanted to keep the entire walk in the film, but it took four minutes, and felt like padding. But we wanted to get a sense of the character portrait coming through… spending time where we have to guess what’s going on in her head. It fits quite neatly with the time in the public toilet earlier and the café.
Gabby: It was very hard to film doing it all in one shot. I semi-dislocated my knee again doing a rehearsal. When it came to do the final thing we do the walk and get up the stars to Mel’s room and to my surprise we open the door and I get a flash of Zak’s arse, I am not quite sure what I was expecting but it was a surprise.
James is really feeling the pressure after this shoot, I think maybe I was letting the weight of the decisions fall more on his shoulders than mine. We had quite a big argument about this and then we meet everyone down the pub where I struggled to pretend that everything is okay. This was probably the lowest point of the shoot for me.
span>
