Vultures Eps4: Meeting Janine Drew & Shooting in the Office (Director’s Diary)

We were in the laneways of Kilkenny once again this morning, filming scenes for Vultures episodes 5 & 6 and it always amazes me; the mixture of reactions we get on the street.

It’s not even strange to us anymore, to walk around town to our shoot locations. But obviously by the reactions we get there’s still a lot of people who don’t know what we’re doing!? They’re walking around on a Monday morning, it’s probably routine and then they turn a corner to meet us; carrying bundles of equipment and strange props, walking straight past them, with a purpose. A strange group of people, some in strange costumes!? Often, already in character and only adding to the weird situation.

But lately, as we walk around filming, we’re starting to get different reactions. We still get the dazed or confused shoppers, there’ll always be those people scuttingly past us slightly terrified, or gatherings of schoolboys at lunchtime. Unfortunately, I think we’ll always get the idiots shouting abuse or the bar-stool-critics. But lately, most people don’t seem so scared of us. Now, when people see us or turn a corner in a laneway and walk straight onto our “set”, more and more of them seem to know what we’re doing. Complete strangers are now smiling and saying hello, people of every shape, age and size seem happy to have bumped into us. Some people seem geniunely excited to have stumbled across “the vultures!”, people shouting the characters names or quotes and people asking for a cameo: some of them have already spent alot of time developing their character!?

For months we’ve been promoting the show anywhere we could; MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, we’ve blogged, we’ve video blogged, bombarded journalists, done interviews, passed out cards and promo shots, used every opportunity to drop ‘Vultures‘ into the smallest of conversations and it’s great to see people’s reactions to it all and how the word is spreading. I have to say thanks to everyone out there who has helped us out in spreading our message “Watch Vultures”. More and more people are watching, and liking it.

Thanks to everyone who has watched it and told their friends or posted about it on their blog, check out Darren Byrnes’s latest post: “Is Janine Drew The Woman For You?” (Thanks dude). Thanks to all the people who give up their free time to help us out or give us a location to shoot in (in some cases meaning we’ll take over your house and rearrange your furniture!?). It’s really appreciated, especially when we know what it’s like to wait weeks for people to get back to us only to be told “no”. But everytime we’re told “no” or something gets in our way, we find a way around it. Usually thanks to the help of people who may not understand why we do it but know we love doing it.

Everytime we get the reactions on the street, the smiles, or people coming up to talk about the show. Everytime we get feedback, positive or negative, or see somebody helping us out, it makes all of the struggles and the long days worth it. We’re continuing to learn but I can safely say we’re shooting some of the best footage we’ve ever shot and I can’t wait for people to see what the future holds for Vultures.

Once again, if you haven’t watched Vultures then shame on you! If you haven’t yet seen ‘The Case Of The Poisoned Dates‘ then the following may contain spoilers!! Click here.

I’ve just uploaded two new batches of behind the scenes photos from episode 4. Firstly, you’ll find a couple more photos from the scene where Jim Vultour (John Morton) and Dan McGrain (David Thompson) meet Janine Drew (Suzanne O’Brien) for the first time. This scene, the first post-title scene, was initially supposed to be our first day’s shoot. Arriving at the gates of St. Josephs on the Waterford Rd. on a cold grey morning. As soon as we unpacked the gear and began to set up, it began to rain. With the energy and enthusiasm that only a first day shooting brings, we brought out the umbrellas, did a tea run and waited in the hope it would stop. The long wait in the ice cold rain. As it slowly broke our spirits with no hope of it stopping, we were smack bang in the middle of shooting being “rained out” on our first day. We retreated back to the office in the hopes of preparing it for shooting scenes scheduled later that week. A plan which eventually fell through as we were missing furniture due to arrive the next day. On my first day as a director, we didn’t get one shot. It was spirit crushing.

Finally, after a couple of days shooting in the comforts of the office (by comforts I mean; it’s got spinny chairs and the kettle is constantly on), we returned to the Waterford Rd for the re-shoot. It was cold but the sun was shining down on us. The new boom mic had little difficulty catching the dialogue-heavy scene, as traffic sped by behind us. One of the biggest problems we’ve always faced is background noise but now we didn’t have to worry and the weather wasn’t going to be a problem. We quickly moved through different setups for the conversation in the scene, moving on to Janine’s entrance sequence in a wrestler meets X-factor contestant style, by that afternoon we had changed locations to shoot the “Janine Drew – Work Experience” trailer. Primarily using Janine to promote the launch of episode 4, their was a genuine buzz about the “chav”s arrival, I held back on any shots that would spoil any of the visual jokes in the scene including a couple of snaps of “the nuns”: Angela Walsh & Kate St John (Kate has endlessly helped us with costumes and is a legend!). You can check out all my shots from this scene here on my flickr.

You’ll also find a second batch of new photos from shoots in the Abbey Business Centre as the V.P.I Office. There’s a mixture of shots from different scenes in there, some days are so hectic that I forget to pick up my camera but for those days I remembered to take some photos I played around with the pre-set colour temperatures, often avoiding the proper one resulting in a strange variation of colour between my shots and how the scene looks in the episode. My memory of these shoots is a bit of a blur, as we bounced around the episode timeline depending on actor availability. I can say we drank a lot of tea, we shot the last scene first and I think we successfully tested new lighting set-ups and angles; shooting a scene in the office with more characters present than ever before, pages of dialogue and characters moving around the small room as people come and go. One of my favourite moments in this scene has to be Inspector Leeson (Paul Young) flashing his badge at Vultour, Janine and McGrain (see above).

We’re past the half way mark shooting episodes 5 & 6. It’s hard to believe it, slowly but surely we’re calling a “Vultures series 1 wrap” on individual actors. I’m not sure what it will be like once we’ve finished shooting. I do know that I’ll have literally hundreds of photos and hours of behind the scenes footage to get through. We continue to learn, hopefully we’ll continue to take things up a notch as the series draws to a close and hopefully you’ll continue to enjoy it (and spread the word!).