Tea, anyone?

Sometimes things don't go your way. I spoke recently about having to contend with the sun coming out. While that was a bizarre occurrence, mostly on the set of Follow the Crows we have to contend with the other elements. Y'know, the ones more recognizable here in sunny England.

We've face it all on the shoot, from trying to get a very integral scene in a wind swept, boggy, rain soaked valley atop the Ridgeway, to finding our fire unable to light because it's just so damned wet. Recently we even had to relocate our entire production to another location, forcing rewrites through at the last minute to accommodate for the slight changes in time and setting.

This may be irritating, it may be infuriating and it most definitely isn't how you want things to go, but it's the rolling with the punches, coming up with new ways to approach things, looking at the problems and figuring out how to solve them that makes film-making such a challenging and fun profession to work within.

You literally never know what is going to go wrong, and you can't guess what it will be, because it will almost be the exact opposite. What you find yourself doing is trying to cover yourself for every eventuality, coming up with a back up location, coming up with a second version of the script that could be used if something goes wrong. But all your efforts in pre-production are often for nothing because, by the time you get on set, something totally unexpected will go wrong.

Planned for a lightning storm? Well, here's a tornado.

Planned for seventy-five feet of snow on the ground? Well, here's a rampaging serial killer.

Whatever can go wrong, will, and whatever you didn't plan for, that will be the thing that gets you when you're down. And it may sound stressful, which it is, but it's fun trying to pick up the pieces.

For example, we arrived on set one day, having scouted for a location my producer and I found a wonderful little place we could use. There was no wind issues, cover in case it decided to rain, we even managed to find a place to part nearby so that we could have easy access to the equipment and such. On the day it was wet, windy and so loud you couldn't hear yourself think.

Whether it simply wasn't a windy day when we scouted it (three times, I might add) or that the wind decided it would come from a different way is anyones guess, but it meant that we just had to shut it down.

Never fear, though, because this is England, and in England we drink cups of a tea and face our problems head on! And that's what we did. We sat down, considered a second location, went there, found it was good, rewrote on the drive to accommodate for time and - tada! - we're back on, having only lost a few hours time.

And that's the fun of film-making, it'll kick you when you're down, and it'll kick you when you're up, but if you're smart enough, calm enough, and you drink lots of tea, then you should be able to come up with a solution.