Pre-Production

• The original beautiful poem was written in the 1600's and I came across it in a collection of metaphysical poetry. Unfortunately I don't know anything about Richard Leigh, and have only read a few other of his poems. I wrote a short adaption of this in 1997 and was going to film it then - that however never eventuated. I came to want to do this now because I found myself with some film stock left over from In My Image which I wanted to use before I sold the camera - and having had all of that stock telecined and not actually working with the beautiful projected images I was determined to do something on Super 8 - but edit the actual film and have the end result a projected film, rather than something you would edit on computer and only see on a television screen. However as the project went on and we started to get some significant interest in it we decided to shoot it on 16mm. The adaption is fairly straight forward - with the poem in voice over to accompanying images, and won't require any sound synching - just nice camera work and good lighting!.

• Well just to bring it all up to date - the crew is pretty well set - haven't cast The First Fair one yet - and haven't been able to finalise the dates yet - this is dependant on other work I'm doing but will most likely be in early May.

• The castle above won't be in the picture! - that's just there till I get a still from the film to make a button with instead!

• I'm actually planning to shoot this with two cameras - the Beaulieu 4008 ZMII Super 8 camera for the actual film and a JVC GRDV820ea miniDV camera for a guide edit and a quick look at how it might all turn out (while I'm waiting for the film to come back from the lab) -- it could be good for comparison shots too - Super 8 and miniDV

• Spent the other day looking around at some old churches here in Brisbane - for something that will give us a wall that will look like the interior of a castle.

• I went to St Stephen's, St John's and All Saints - and actually the one that interests me the most is a wooden paneled wall in a building adjoining St John's - St Martin's House. The woman in the poem is I imagine fairly wealthy and so is probably more likely to be in more wealthy surrounds - such as the wooden paneling suggests. I've written to the Dean of St John's and am waiting to hear back from him to see if we have permission to film in there.
  

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