Hello Again!

You're right Jessica - I never would have put up with such a long break on any of your blogs ;) Sorry guys! I've been alive, just busy. I spent a few days down in Melbourne (you'll have to look up a map of Australia to see where Melbourne is in relation to Brisbane, but it's one the capital cities and it was a few hours plane ride away) doing some shooting there, then I came back to Brisbane and spent a few days doing some shooting here in Brisbane for a different project. Shooting days are long days, so I was tired and didn't blog! I was also trying to organize a shoot in Cambridge and Paris over in the UK (thanks Jenny for continually answering my 'what time is it over there' questions!) I didn't head over myself, and it's hard to organize things from the other side of the world. I found a good Aussie producer living in London though, so I felt alright about it in the end. He'll send the footage over tomorrow - fingers crossed it's good footage!

Next week I'll be back in the office and should be better about blogging :) I'll be relieved to be back in the office because I have so much post and prep work to do - it crazy when a bundle of jobs come in all at once! The following week I'll be up in Mt. Isa shooting - that's a rural mining town that's well and truly in the outback, so it should be interesting. I'll also have a shoot for a large bank either before or after it - I'm hoping that I'll only need to shoot in Brisbane for that one, because I honestly don't have time to go away again right now - even though I normally love the travelling and seeing new places part of my job :)

Things have been fun, and I've seen lots of new things again, but I did have one very tedious days shoot here in Brisbane: I was supposed to be shooting about 5 or 6 interviews in front of a greenscreen we were setting up in a board room in a tall building in the city. I was interviewing some key players who are working on a major infrastructure construction project in Queensland, just talking about environment and community relations, engineering, quality, resources, corporate approach etc. etc. (I asked a different set of questions depending on who I was interviewing). Anyway, the night before, the clients told me they actually had a few more people to interview... The next day I did 23 interviews. You start to forget your name when you spend 10 hours in a room with a greenscreen, interviewing an endless supply of engineers! I learnt a lot about Dam building, but I think I traded about 1,435,782 brain cells for the information!

I've done a lot of interviewing in the last year, and I generally enjoy it. Usually I have a pretty fair idea of the kinds of things I want/need them to say because I've got a loose script in mind (scripting is always a challenge when the dialogue is based on interviews, so most of the scripting gets done after the interviews are done). I enjoy the challenge of getting something good from the people I talk to. Some interviewees are just, point blank, terrible, and you're never going to get anything good from them - those guys you just try and wrap up quickly. But other times, you know they're interesting, articulate and passionate because you've talked to them off camera, and then the challenge is to get them to relax and act like that when the camera's on them (as soon as the camera's rolling they forget how to smile and talk in complete sentences without 'ah, ah, um, hmm' all through their answers). I also enjoy the challenge of letting the interview develop along interesting tangents - listening for some interesting side note they mention in an answer and pursuing it with them. Sometimes that's how you get the most interesting and usable pieces. Then finally, there are my favourite interview subjects - the absolute naturals :) They smile, they're easy, their answers are nice and succinct and they think quickly on their feet. On my 23-interviews day, the 'naturals' were few and far between. I don't think I saw the first one until I was about 12 interviews in and I almost fell on my knees and proposed to him! ;)

Well there you have it - that's where I've been: just working. Sometimes I wonder when I'll start having an 'actual' life to write about :)

xo Tammy

PS. My brother Oliver and I were looking at a site last night: http://improveverywhere.com/ It's a group of people who pull large scale stunts (all around NYC by the looks of things). If you have a second, read some of their mission highlights - Oli and I were laughing so hard our tummys hurt :) A couple of our favourites were 'Ted's Birthday' and 'Best Game Ever'... okay, so we only looked at those two because we were tired, but they were wonderful - I'm sure the others are good too. I heard about them on the news, and wanted to have a better look. They should give you a great laugh if you have a moment :)