Beds, Budgets and Breakfast

As Production Manager I had to organise the crew's life for the week. As we wanted to shoot as soon as possible to allow plenty of time for the edit and possible reshoots preventing last minute panics, so I had around 3 weeks to get everything organised. I started by looking at accomodation as this was going to be our biggest expense and determiner of whether or not post-production could join for the shoot.

I started by looking at a few B&B options that were close to the Ounsworth's home (Sharing these with the group on the Slack page I'd created) but all of these were quite pricey and as we were having a few earlier starts we may not have been able to take advantage of the Breakfast portion so we'd essentially be wasting money. I then took a look at AirBnB, we were already scheduled to film mid-week as accomodation tends to be more expensive Friday-Monday.

The townhouse that we ended up booking had all the ammenities we needed, was a short drive from the ferry station and was within walking distance of the filming location and convience shops. With some people doubling up in rooms or sleeeping on the sofa we had enough space for the whole crew.

(The Airbnb listing.)

The next big thing to keep a crew happy is food. As both Stan and Ryan were also on set I planned on making everything from scratch as I would be less necessary on set all the time. I 100% underbudgeted food massively but luckily this was at a point when we were considering using a drone so the money that had been budgetted for this could go into the food budget.

Ryan had a meeting during the morning we intended to travel to the island and Robyn who had agreed to drive us was a space short in the car, so it was planned that Ryan would get the train (a journey he's done frequently as he lives 5 minutes from the filming location) and meet us later. As we had people travelling at different times and on the next shoot day a few different call times for less necessary crew members I decided to create call sheets alongside the general schedules (Which aren't posted here as they have the crew's personal details on). I scheduled the first two days leaving the final day more open dependent on what shots we had left to shoot and allowing the crew a bit of a lie in after two earlier mornings (especially with me waking up at 4am), this extra time also allowed me to do a cooked breakfast for the crew on the final day whilst everyone packed and got ready.