Campaigns Blog

STARX'D blog - Day 6

By Ayesha Hafiz

Salaams everyone!

I have to say today was very hectic and full of lots of hard work and there we were thinking that things couldn’t get any more productive than they were yesterday.

Our aims for the day was to shoot all of the internal scenes of Rami & Jamila in Musab’s flat (which he kindly offered to let us use), record Zahra’s voiceover and get Fatema’s shot for the credits.  All was quite relaxed to begin with and Belal was adamant that each one of us played a role on-screen as well as off-screen and lucky me; I got the best role of them all!  I got to play the ‘old aunty’, which was rather amusing.  It’s amazing how wearing a dull coloured scarf and a pair of glasses can add age to your image.  The ‘living room’ scene was a lot of fun and I think our highlight of that morning was when Mooch dropped the Shisha all over the floor and his sock was drenched with water.  He was walking around in one sock for the rest of the day.

We had a really tasty meal for lunch, courtesy of MYH, grilled chicken and fat chips!  It was good stuff, I think we all enjoyed it very much as there wasn’t anything left at the end. 

After lunch, things were getting slightly tensed up because we still had a lot of scenes to film and we were running quite short of time.  We had now moved on to the ‘bedroom scene’ where our main character, Jamila, would do most of her contemplating. While we were doing the ‘bedroom scenes’ someone had decided to log on to a Twilight website on the laptop and leave pictures of Rob Pattinson on display which was quite distracting for some of us, (I mention no names).  For some reason, as Mehreen mentioned in one of the earlier posts, Twilight has been a sort of ‘motivation’ for our group.

 

Spending time with Mooch behind the camera was educating and interesting.  He taught us about lighting and the techniques of filming nightlight as well and daylight.  We were all given the opportunity to have our say in choices of angles, props and actions.  This entire project has been based on teamwork and we’ve all done a really good job of it.

I think it would be fair to say that today was definitely the most tiring day for all of us, especially Zahra.  She didn’t get a break all day and had to change her costume about three times, and she had to squeeze herself into Musab’s small wardrobe to record her voiceover because it had to be recorded without any other sound interference.  It was a great experience for her though and for all of the rest of us.  Mehreen did a brilliant job at being assistant director and she had some great ideas.  Samia had us all in hysterics after an unexpected remark she made while she was still in character for the film and Ijaz was rather quiet today. I think he was worn out after having to perfect his line yesterday, ‘Jamila, I want to marry you’.  Poor Ijaz was outnumbered by all of us girls and we made sure that he played the perfect Rami.

 

We finished slightly later than normal today and had a lot of tidying up to do.  Although we weren’t too great at it due to everyone’s eagerness to leave quickly, sorry Musab!  Belal was getting really late for a performance he had to do at my university and Osha was already missing the Egypt vs Ghana match, while Fatema was panicking over her coursework.  

I have to say, this project has been a lot of fun and I definitely learned a lot more out of it than I had assumed I would have and I can’t believe how quickly the time has gone by.  I’ve met some amazing people through this project and I feel like we all formed a little family over the past few weekends.  It’s been a really exciting experience and I cannot wait until the editing is complete so that we can screen Rami & Jamila and watch all of our ideas and production come together onscreen!

Thanks MYH for giving us this cool opportunity! :D