Diary of a Spaniard
in Oxford
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And the first prize goes to 5.25! The first prize! You’ve won the first prize and you receive congratulations and all the rest, which is great. Yet when it’s all over, then what? Well, normally I might have felt let down, however there was no time for that since my prize was to film another short at the NYFA (the New York Film Academy); I had to start work right away (and in fact, I ended up shooting not one short but three during the week the course lasted). So I started thinking until I came up with another mini-script. But this time instead of 30 seconds, I decided to make a super production and try the three and a half minute format! (What a challenge! Hope I don’t run out of steam…). Instead of going to New York, I decided to take the course in Oxford, which is closer (and also has an NYFA branch).
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First Steps
Now it was up to me to prepare the way before going to England. My first step was translating the script into English. I tried doing it myself, but for some strange reason, it wasn’t really satisfactory. A lady friend gave me a hand to give it a professional “British” touch. My script idea was to play with the elements in 5.25, but from a different perspective: in other words, a shop and a little old lady. Eventually, however, the old lady played a very small role since my main character was a 10-year-old boy (there I go – all the way to the other end of the age curve).
Next, I had to find a child actor! Surfing the Web I found a children’s theatre group near Oxford, so I contacted them, sent my script and set up an appointment right after my arrival. I decided to solve the problem of finding the shop once I got to Oxford, because by Internet…
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Fewer sambas and more work
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I finally arrived in London airport and had to wait two hours having missed the bus for Oxford. Terrific. So what do you do with two free hours in an airport? Film a short, of course.
I didn’t have what you could call a real video camera with me, but I remembered that my photographic camera also recorded video. Quite “Notodo”, wasn’t it? I thought for about ten minutes and inspiration came (the idea wasn’t very original and totally influenced by the reality of airports last summer). Now it was time to shoot. People were looking at me strangely. That’s the film world for you! It’s not my best story, but I had a great time editing it afterward. (It’s called Delay and here it is if you want to take a look.)
And finally Oxford, the famous academic city. It’s a lovely place, but I couldn’t dally because I had to find a shop, check out the boy, look for an old lady and cross my fingers that everything would turn out well!
  
I arrived on a Saturday afternoon and on Sunday morning I met my leading actor: a blonde boy with an angelical face (when I wrote my story I was thinking about New York and a little black boy from the depths of Harlem or something similar…). His mother, who taught in the theatre group, was very nice and since she knew I needed an old lady, she introduced me to the boy’s grandmother (double casting!). She wasn’t exactly the adorable Miss Marple type I had envisioned (she was a little younger and had more in common with Jessica Fletcher), but she’d do.
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Shopping for shops
It took the rest of Sunday morning to find a shop. My first choice was a typical 24x7 convenience store like the Kwik-E-Mart in the Simpsons. When I mentioned shooting the film, the local Apu turned pale and told me I had to speak to the manager, who apparently wasn’t there at the time. This tactic wasn’t working out, so I decided to change my strategy and look for a shop where the owners were also the clerks: hence no more convenience stores. I finally found a pound shop run by an English couple. I asked the woman for permission to shoot and she said it was up to her husband, but before consenting, the husband glanced at his wife who nodded in agreement from afar. Married couples are the same all over!
  
They were very nice people and so to ingratiate myself I bought a few things. When it came time to pay, I began to search for the exact amount among my pile of pound, quarter pound and whatever coins and mentioned how easy it was to travel in euros. The woman got really upset! “Their” pounds were a sign of cultural identity; they carried the Queen’s effigy; etc. I ate my words immediately in order not to lose my set! I made an appointment to film on Wednesday from 12 noon to 4 pm, but they were going to keep the shop open.
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Preparations
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We started classes on Monday. There were four of us, so it was like a family. That day they explained to us the workings of the PANASONIC X-100, the camera we were going to use. It’s a video camera but it records progressively. Not bad. Although I would have preferred to film in 16 mm (as they do in the four-week courses), I was glad in a way, because I couldn’t use artificial lighting in the shop and you wouldn’t have seen much using a movie camera.
I took advantage of the afternoon to stop by the shop and plan my shots (all made with the camera on my shoulder because there was no room to set up a tripod and even less room when people were walking around making their purchases).
  
All day Tuesday was devoted to classes in scriptwriting, some directing skills and editing. In the afternoon, I visited my “set” and filmed almost the entire short with my photo/video camera, casting myself as the only actor, to be sure my visual decisions were correct. That way, the shop owners were getting used to my presence and I saw how they accepted having someone monkeying around there. (For the moment there were no problems.)
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Time to play!
First thing Wednesday morning we recorded part of a short by one of my classmates and then we all went to my “set”. The owners were as pleasant as usual and I wondered how long this would last once we started to work. I began to rehearse with the boy and to my surprise discovered that he was a professional actor disguised as a boy (something like Haley Joel Osment). He arrived having already rehearsed the script and he understood his character’s motivations perfectly. He freaked me out!
And his grandmother – well, she wasn’t my little old lady from 5.25, but she was fine for the role and besides this time the short focused on the boy.
Shooting went well. I tried to make decisions as fast as possible (previsualisation with my photographic camera the day before was a great help).
  
It was really unbearable to have to wait until the customers entering the shop left. We couldn’t pressure them or say anything. Sometimes we would be just about to take the final shots when someone would come in and – you guessed it – we had to leave the aisle free. Always with a smile of course (whatever made me write a script that took place in a shop). And yes, the moment I had feared so much finally came and the owner exploded. She came up to me and said, “A customer didn’t enter the shop and it’s your fault!” That’s it, I thought. No more shooting, but she went back behind the counter and we were more careful about not disturbing the entry of “her” customers. And that was that.
Another problem with the shooting was the heat. As you know, the British don’t usually have heat waves as strong as those last summer and there are few air conditioners. I don’t believe they even know they exist!
We took 24 shots, repeating them sometimes 7 or 8 times (I was really glad it was not a movie…). In general, the owners treated us very well. You’ve got to have guts to let strangers shoot a film in your shop.
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