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| Istvan and Karmen (aka Bill and Liz) |
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| Toufiq and Kate |
Yesterday saw the second stage of our film project, and I woke up with a start at 6am, realising how much I had left to organise in the next twelve hours.
Our drama development worker, Izzy Swanson, had hand delivered a wedding dress to my house the night before, and my boss, Kate Niven, had managed to borrow a surplice and dog collar. My garden is bursting with bluebells at the moment, so the bridal bouquet was not a problem. I scrounged some floral wire and ribbon from Stems (our lovely local florist) and scooped up the last packets of confetti from the party shop.
Yet, several factors seemed to be beyond my control. The first of these was the Shetland weather, which decided to spend the morning and afternoon alternating between chilly showers and warm sunshine. I had told my learners that we would not be filming if it rained, and started wishing that I had given them a little more lexical input into degrees of precipitation intensity. If only I had flagged up the difference between a shower and a deluge! The other big unanswered question was exactly how many folk would turn up. Attendance starts to wane at this time of year anyway, with many working overtime and some returning home for holidays. Would we have anything like the amount of bodies required to make up an authentic looking wedding party?
I sent out reminder texts to all in sundry, begged a few friends to come along as extras and then tried to forget it all by focusing on my own wedding look.
By six o’clock the sky had finally decided to settle on a deep azure blue and by five past six a finely dressed wedding party of a respectable size had assembled in the Old Library Building. The central characters stood up and introduced themselves, and various other parts were assigned on the spot (mother of the bride, the bride’s yokel relatives etc.) We then crossed the road to the town hall. I asked the crowd to walk around introducing themselves to each other and shaking hands. This broke the group up, and the resulting chit chat and laughter made the group look like a real wedding party. In fact, several passing cars tooted their horns, clearly convinced of our authenticity! It was great fun.
We had inserted stage directions in the monologues, and it took less than an hour to work through these and get the footage we needed. Clint will be returning to help the learners work through the editing process, and I for one, can’t wait to see the result.
