Training in Practise

As promised part 2 of the Royal Tyrrell Training Video. We pick up the epic tale of its production already in progress:

With a rough script, permission to film, and a team to carry it out filming was set for the 2004 reading week. I would drive up from Calgary while Dan and Will would come down from Edmonton.

First order of business was the equivalent of producer studio type stuff. Which is a first and only for us at Prehistoric Insanity. We had to negotiate with museum management the terms and conditions by which we were allowed to film, and more important show it in summer training. The general gist was that we signed away the rights of the film (which we got back... as you'll see later in the story) and that they had final say on which parts would make it into the final product.

So with this step out of the way our production team jumped into filming action. We filmed the walk throughs of the museum where there is no talking, and where other members of staff are seen in shot.

This was where we hit our first production snag. The higher high ups got mad at us for filming in the galleries while visitors were in the building. Yet no arrangments had been made to for us to film on our own, and more important they hadn't told us before hand about this restriction.

On this first night rather then wait on the solution to that problem we jumped on other key scenes. The first was the infamous breakfast scene in which myself, Daniel, and Traumador are all eating together. This was complicated for two reasons. Will was my second hand throughout the scene holding up the newspaper, and it was fairly uncomfortable for him. Second we had an external mic which led to our most complicated film shot of that time. Fortuently Cam and Evan were kind enough to help us with the sequence.

The next day we filmed all the sequences in the apartment which was all in Cam's house. Included in this was of course my favorite place in their house the basement (I tried for 3 years to live down there in the summer to no avail). We also filmed the sequences in the education office and the fake interview workshop that day.

This left us with all the storyline stuff, and not much of the training material. It looked bad. Without that meat there wasn't much point to the video. On our last day in town finally arrangements were made for us to be allowed into the museum an hour before it opened. This lead to a frantic, but in the end HIGHLY productive set of shots. Every shot with Traumador and Dan in the museum talking was done in this morning.

Just to make things interesting on that day though the external mic broke, and put the camera out of comission for an hour till our hero Ken could fix it...

That ended the first production phase. The story would be far from over however. We got the majority of the movie done EXCEPT many of the summer program clips. These would still be filmed over the course of the next 3 months of 04. Also the censorship and editing battle with the higher ups would begin...

These tales are yet to come. Till then enjoy part 2