'Heathen' logs part 4

For the last 7 days we've been shooting a lot. The softly softly approach was ditched for the last week as Thomas J Grube flew in from New York to take up one of the major roles in the film. It was a fantastic experience to work with Thomas again. I hadn’t seen him in over 2 years since 'Night Shift', and just like on that shoot he was a pleasure to work with. I felt that everyone raised their game somewhat whilst he was around - our small team really finding it's stride. Of course, with so much to film in such a little amount of time we had a few slight hiccups along the way, but thankfully luck was kind on us in a lot of ways and we shot what I believe will be some of the best scenes in the film so far. As mentioned the week was not without its few problems and after setting up to shoot for a whole day in the forest, we found ourselves blighted by low flying planes. It was terrible and I knew straight away there was no way we could carry on, so we got right back on the road and trekked out to a woods location I'd used several times in the past. We made up for the time lost though and despite running later than planned we got back on schedule with where I had hoped to be. After this the week went from strength to strength. Aside from Thomas joining the team, we also shot our first scenes with Steve Lorrigan. I certainly asked a lot of Steve and threw him in somewhat at the deep end, but he nailed it and was a pleasure to work with. He has one last scene to shoot which we should be getting to in the coming weeks. I'll look back on this week fondly, Thomas stayed with me throughout his visit and we would sit there each evening watching rushes and talking about the next days filming - it was great fun. It was rare for this film to be moving at such a break neck pace but thanks to Amber, Tom, Jamie, Steve and Thomas I can now sit back on nearly 6 more hours of footage. I can see the end of the shooting now, before this was hard to imagine, but now its actually within reach. I find myself drawn to thinking just as much about the edit, the score and the all that lies ahead.