Five

'Five' was shot in November 2006 on location in the Waitakeres. The principal photography lasted 8 days and it took another 2 days for pickups. The biggest challenge of the production was that the location was inaccessible by road and we had to tramp (hike) in for an hour with all our equipment, food, water and bedding before we got to the hut, which we used as a location and that also doubled up as our accommodation.

Weekend-1

First day of any feature shoot is always tough because the cast and crew are trying to find the rhythm of the movie. But being on such a short production schedule, we did not really have the time to get into the rhythm but had to find it ourselves. I felt really lucky to be working with such a talented bunch of people because everyone found their rhythm really quick and we were shooting right from the word ‘go’. We did not stay at the hut for the night and returned to our cars before sunset. It was a good way of getting the entire cast and crew to get used to the location and the production challenges before we started spending entire weekends at the hut.Each subsequent weekend brought in it’s own challenges and we had to find ways to work with them to achieve what we wanted to achieve.

Weekend-2

The first full weekend at the hut, we were surprised by the number of rats at the hut. As soon as our candles went out the rats would come out and run amok in the hut. We got around the problem by buying hug candles for the following weekends.

Saturday was full on and really intense. Everyone woke up at 5.45 AM and started shooting from 7.00 AM. Everyone got right into the spirit of it and the day cruised along really fast. After we had our lunch – we decided to take a little hike into the woods. We saw a waterfall located on the map and when I had talked to people earlier in the week, they said it was about 30-35 minutes walk from the hut. It turned out to be an adventure in itself and we made it back to the hut just before it went dark and the climb up and down the hill was the biggest challenge that the whole crew faced. By the end of the day everyone was just exhausted and really happy to go to bed after the dinner.

The lesson learnt that day was not to indulge in location extravaganzas especially if we did not know of the area beforehand and we decided that it would be wise to film majority of the stuff around the hut in order to cut down on travel times. Since we had a long day, I decided that it had to be a late start the following day. Everyone slept like a baby that night – no amount of rats could wake us up.

The filming on Sunday was pretty uneventful till the afternoon and we were able to get most of the stuff done. As we started filming the climax of act-1 of the movie, we weren’t sure that it would work and after much deliberation and discussion decided to leave the remaining scenes alone and come back to them at a later point. It sounds like a pretty bad idea – not sticking to the script and the schedule but trust me there is always a point where you got to trust your instinct and we did that.

Weekend-3

Carrying on from the script changes we identified over the weekend - the actors and me met up on a Wednesday evening to have a script workshopping session. We spent about 3.5 hours talking about stuff, brainstorming and introduced new elements into the second act of the story, which tied in the overall story threads a lot better.This obviously developed new challenges in terms of rescheduling the scenes and the order in which they would play out on the weekend. To top things up the weather forecast wasn't too good for the weekend either, which was another cause for worry. So all of us went into the weekend - a bit unsure of how things were going to shape up. When the production is rolling it is best not to fight the change but to roll with it and adapt to the situation - without which a production can come to a grinding halt. It always helps when you have a cast and crew who are willing to give more than what is usually expected of them. Having Mike (the art director) on set over the weekend helped us heaps in terms of keeping things moving as he would take care of things which seemed small but in the longer run helped us save heaps of time. This time around we got huge candles with us – which would last the night, so that we didn’t have the rats running all over us - it worked.

Saturday started off with a heavy downpour and I decided that we had to keep going on with the filming otherwise we would never get the movie done. Benji looked at me and said said “This is insanity” and I just smiled back at him. Since we are filming most of the stuff chronologically it did not bother me too much that we are filming in different weather conditions -in fact the couple of scenes we filmed when it was raining shaped out to be beautiful looking scenes. After that everything was a blur with the rate of shooting we were doing.

Weekend-4

It was supposed to be our last weekend of filming. In between the third weekend and the fourth weekend, the climax of cycle-1 was re-analyzed and re-written, in order to keep the structure of the movie intact while building on the tension within the storyline that we had filmed up to that point. D F Mamea did a quick write-up of the climax based on the production information I gave him. We then tweaked the write up as as we started filming.

Each weekend has been special and challenging but this one was by far the toughest one and definitely one of the most satisfying ones. We started off late on Saturday afternoon since the plan was to do night shoot for the climax of act-1. We got to the location at 1.30 PM and took a good hour’s break before we started filming the climax of act-2. It started shaping up really nicely and by the time we were hitting the stride with it we were into the late hours of the evening. So we took a dinner break and started preparing for the night shoot.In between all this we had 3 trampers (NZ term for 'hikers') come to the hut and were wondering what we were doing there since they had paid to stay there the night. We compared papers and found that even though our production had booked out the hut for all the weekends in November for filming, someone had made the mistake and double booked it for that night.

Luckily the main guy in the other group also worked in the film industry and understood what we were doing and compromised on the whole thing - he put up his tent behind the hut, so they wouldn't get in our way. It was a really sweet thing to do and then they put up with our screaming and yelling which went into the early hours of Sunday.

Talking of the night shoot - one of the most challenging things with this entire production has been that the location does not have any electricity or running water or anything 'normal' you can imagine. Carrying a generator for an hour through a muddy and uneven track into the woods isn't exactly a feasible solution. In this scenario going into a night shoot was a small nightmare as we had no lights or light sources bright enough to light up the scene in anyway whatsoever. Benji and me did a quick lighting test earlier in the week and found that we needed lots of light to make the night shots work. Solution - Lance, Benji and me went and bought heaps of candles and I also bought 2 gas lanterns which put out an equivalent of 75W house bulb each and also borrowed another gas lantern from James. This was our lighting equipment and the three of us were very apprehensive of how it would shape up. But on Saturday night thanks to Lance, Benji and Mike - things worked out really well in terms of getting the lighting right. We ended up using a little bit of gain on the camera but overall that entire set of scenes look really nice with some great mood lighting.Hats off to the cast and crew, who kept their focus and went through till 3.00 in the morning - which is when we completed the night shoot. A really satisfying shoot in the end. We didn't see or hear any rats through the shoot, which I reckon is because of all the light that was there in the hut.

Day-8 & Pickups

We went back to the location one day in December to finish off the remaining filming. From a production point of view I was worried about paying extra money to secure location permits but luckily for us ARC (Auckland regional Council) included that day in our contract as our rain day. The filming was intense since it involved a lot of running and screaming plus there was a fair bit of tweaking involved while filming, to increase the impact of what would be seen on screen. The day finished as per plan and It had been such an awesome experience on the production that it was a sad walk back to the cars knowing that what we had done was something special and different and that it woud be a while before the team worked together again.

We still had the opening scene of the movie to film and also a couple of scenes which we left out because of availability of the actors. We finished the rest of the scenes at the end of March '2007. This proved to be a blessing in disguise because I had done the assemble edit and it gave me an opportunity to see what we needed to film to make the story work.

One of the most challenging of the pickup scenes was trying to shoot 'day for night' of a chase sequence in the afternoon. A task made especially difficult with the fact that we did not have any lights etc. It was a lot of inventiveness and thinking on the feet by Benji that made that shoot work.

I keep saying this but I think I really am lucky to have been working with such a fine group of people - the cast, the crew and the people behind the movie - who have made this experiment possible. Plus the weather Gods have favored us for better part of the shoot and it has been monumental in making the movie happen.