Campaigns Blog

STARX'D blog - Day 4

By Mehreen Khan

Day 4 (Sunday 24 Jan) started with Fox biscuits and some Bingo, actually day 4 really started with everyone in a state of shock at how Belal really enjoyed the Twilight movie and attempted to defend Kristen Stewart’s acting! And then we played Bingo. Everyone huddled around each other frantically scribbling down names to find people who ‘had lived abroad’, ‘have a pet’ and ‘were getting married in two years’. The last one was definitely the hardest when you’re surrounded mainly by 14-18 years olds! But well done Fatema for winning as she got them all and piped us to the post (I’m sure I was a close second).

At the end of day 3 we were told to each find quotes that we felt were relevant to the issues and themes in our film. Everyone came back with quotes on marriage, love and freedom. After we read them out to each other and embarrassed Ijaz for reacting to his with the biggest ‘aaaawwww’ in the world, we wrote them down on big, fancy coloured card.

 

Some of the quotes included ‘Love is blind, marriage is the eye-opener’, ‘Don’t marry the one you love, love the one you marry’, and on a less optimistic note ‘Marriages are made in heaven, but then again so is thunder’.

After the quote cards we did some script reading with our background song choice, we did this a few times as it helped us to decide at which points in the music some of the lines should be said. We managed to find a great song choice (Kal Ho Na Ho instrumental) which everyone is really excited to use. We also had a look at a clip from Twilight, given Belal’s new enthusiasm for it. Twilight has been somewhat of a recurring theme in our project (mainly down to Osha’s obsession with it) and always manages to pop up in every workshop.  I think when marking the end of the project, a Twilight related celebration is now in order!

Lunch was great as Musab and Rukaiya put on a great spread for us, but my favourite part of lunch was...JENGA. Since I had never played Jenga before, which some of the group were absolutely appalled by, we decided to have a game. Although my world was shaken a bit when I was told you don’t actually shout ‘Jenga’ at any point (why would the adverts lie to us?) we had a game filled with so much pressure that Rukaiya left to be the camerawoman as, in her own words, ‘her heart couldn’t take it anymore’.

 

After lunch, we got our coats and went for a stroll around the local area to find and take pictures of the locations for our external scenes. We were looking for a set of stairs (to try and echo the balcony scene of Romeo & Juliet) and a park. We also wanted different locations for our end credits. All in all, we achieved our aims, and were spoilt for choice when it came to stairs as we now have a choice of three we could use. After a long, cold and long walk to Wellington park (we totally took the bus on the way back) we took some great shots and decided Wellington Park was perfect to film in.

When we got back to the MYH offices, we met Mooch, a friend of Belal’s who will be our cameraman, director and will be showing us the technical side of things, such as editing and sound. Mooch was great, we introduced ourselves and did a run through of the script for him.

Day 4 ended with a full rehearsal of the play, ready to be filmed next weekend!