EXTRAS! EXTRAS!

Morning, all. Happy Monday and all that.

As you’ve probably seen, we had a mostly successful Digi Level 2 shoot at the weekend. The only downside was that Gannon got ill during the filming, and had to sit out a big chunk of it.

On the plus side, this meant more for Sanja to do, but we will have to film a little bit extra to explain why he suddenly ran off in the middle of a scene! It should be seamless though; we managed to contrive something on set.

I’ve got to say, it was a LOT of fun. For us anyway. I hope it was for the set visitors too; there’s always a ton of just sitting around during filming. 

I mean, it was also utterly exhausting; I went into the weekend already feeling burnt out from writing an entire 90-page screenplay for somebody in three days at the beginning of last week. Then there was the two-hour drive – we’d have stayed over if we hadn’t be bringing Gannon with us – straight into setting up, then eight hours of filming, then taking down the set, then driving home.

A ton of work for what will probably amount to three minutes of finished footage. 

We honestly couldn’t have done it without help (particularly as this time Sanja was in front of the camera); especially from Tori, Steve, Graham and Ben – but also all the extras, who were brilliant.

It’s one of the miracles when we do stuff like this; people just want to help, and sort of gravitate into roles without us having to be formal about it. I mean, I’ll give us some credit; we’re good at delegating and trusting others, but we’ve always gotten lucky. The teams just seem to form naturally. We owe so many favours by now.

The clip we shot will be the very first part of the upcoming series – linking classic Digi to modern Digitiser to Digi Level 2. It sets it all up as part of one (semi) cohesive universe. Sort of.

And... what a relief to have the whole thing (mostly) in the can now. Psychologically, that's a huge relief. This has been the project that never ends for us - obviously, you know why it has been delayed - but it means a lot that people have trusted that we'd get it finished eventually. We really, really appreciate that nobody has nagged us.

I mean, we've filmed more than twice what we needed, so that's a big part of why it has felt like this monolithic mountain to climb. You'll get your money's worth!

We’d really, really missed doing this sort of narrative storytelling. It probably gives me more of a buzz than anything else. I still want to make Found Footage 2 when we’ve finally gotten Digi Level 2 out of the way. Or something longer, like The Trojan Arse Protocol. 

Having seen the footage we got on Saturday (there’s some un-graded raw footage above) I’m always amazed at the quality of what we managed to achieve on such a relatively tiny budget. I do wonder what we could do with something a bit longer-form… A Digitiser movie? A Supernatural World film? I’m not ruling it out.

The only thing would be… if we did a crowd-funder… was that there were no physical rewards in the traditional sense. Oddly, it’s the most stressful part of it all. We can’t even think about our next big project until everything is done and dusted with fulfilling the Digi Level 2 backer tiers. Having rewards gives a false impression of how much money is actually raised, because all those rewards have to be paid for and sent out. I'd rather give people experiences, like on Saturday. Things that money can't buy.

But anyway. It's all part of the deal, I guess. We'll see.

The most enjoyable aspect of Digi Level 2 for us has been getting many of you involved on screen for Drong’s Challenge and as zombie extras. If we do film something like either of those things again – or a movie - I’m sure we will put out a call. 

Anyhow. I’m still trying to recover today. By which I mean… it’s a ‘research’ day for our next couple of Digi videos. We’ll likely have one more regular one this month before we go into our Christmas videos (which will include a live-streamed ‘Christmas Party’ with Paul and Eli), date tbd.

Chat to some of you on Thursday for Biffo’s Brain.

Paul