The Shoot!

On a Friday morning, 7th August 2009, at 8.00am sharp the trucks rolled down the narrow alley leading towards the studio in the industrial sector of Al Quoz, Dubai.

Friday, for those of you who don't know, is the first day of our weekend here in Dubai, so I was very relieved to see that we at least had some of the crew and all of the equipment for the shoot! One by one, other technical crew-members began to arrive and also, slightly later, the various members of the In Support of Peace One Day committee!

Setting up the studio, hiring in the equipment, getting the crew there, making sure everyone was happy, none of this was really a concern to me. What worried me the most was, would any children turn up?

We had sent out hundreds of emails to casting agencies, friends and co-workers all over Dubai telling them about our shoot for this Peace Film. We had put flyers up in the big local supermarkets and kid recreation areas and although we had some great responses back none of it was guaranteed until they actually turned up.

At 9.30am, half an hour before we were officially due to start, my fears began to vanish when the first children arrived. We were off.

Before I knew it we always had a back log of anyway between 2-5 kids waiting throughout the rest of the day, with the exception of lunchtime, where we had a small window to wolf down some quesadillas and nachos and to my amazement, shoot a second short film in 20 minutes, called "The History Book", that our brilliant creatives from the advertising agency that are supporting us, came up with.

The shoot was by no means plain sailing. Ali Moustafa, our director, had to work tirelessly to get the children to open up to us as many of these kids had never been in front of the camera and became very shy.

Also, as the studio was based in the middle of the industrial sector so we had to contend with a lot of unwanted ambient noise, including hammers banging on metal for a large portion of the morning (never a good thing when you are trying to record clean sound!).

However we did, as suspected, get some hilarious answers from the kids on what they thought peace and also fighting/war was. One child who observantly pointed out when asked "what is fighting?" responded with, "fighting is what my mum and dad do!" The rather unfortunate mum, standing next to me, blushed a deep purple, but fortunately saw the funny side!

By the end of a very draining and sweaty day (we could not have the air conditioning on in the studio because it made too much noise and that is no fun when it is 42 degrees outside!) at 5.45pm I called time on the shoot, got everyone together and put them in front of the camera so we could give some faces to the people who worked so hard behind the scenes to make the short films happen.

With some fantastic camera work, lighting, sound and direction we have captured the innocence of what a child thinks about both Peace and War in two short films and as a bonus have a beautiful third film about history and war.

I can't thank the crew and committee enough for their help and support on the day and the suppliers, who gave us the studio and all the equipment for free, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you!

Peace,

Oliver Roskill