Monday was rather hectic, with a presentation on Thursday and Technical Meeting in Tunis next week to prepare for...and Tuesday and Wednesday written off!
Tuesday saw me hopping onto a train to Schiphol wih Paul Wood, early again (ouch), to meet a couple of film directors flying over from the UK. Ta-dum! No, not quite that exciting but basically I was going to be filming some features about being a geologist in the oil industry, for the re-opening of a geology museum in Scarborough :-)
Poster girl to the limit...so, there I was panicking about my presentation and my generally awful appearance due to sleep deprivation, sitting on an awful Dutch train (don't do it! - outside of Ams-Rotterdam section, ugh) for 2 1/2 hours all the way up to Groningen. We went through my questions (unscripted...hhhhhh) and finally arrived at the rig (yep, yeehaa, we made it to the real world). Set up, preparations, slight confusion as this rig did not look like the ones I've seen before...then, action! It was freezing cold and pretty tough going for the unscripted straight from scratch, and I felt I might have performed better with a bit more sleep, but we got loads of material and by the end I was getting the hang of it.
The drillers were sniggering a bit though the DSV just seemed to be resigned to the fact that women were taking over the world...I couldn't resist winding him up about his lego beautiful controls :-)
Here's one of "my crew": Paul, the two directors, gaffer and cameraman
Wednesday was day 2 of filming, this time in Rijswijk in the visualisation room and the core lab.
I caked on a ton of make-up (the train back had taken its time, and I was working on my presentation, so got home quite late and couldn't get an early night...) and went for it. This time, most of the work was scripted, reading off an autocue. I really enjoyed that part, especially after an hour or so of warming up, and they did a lot of re-takes of other things in the core lab as I was feeling a lot more relaxed and "natural" in front of the camera.
I learnt a lot from this experience, and really it isn't as easy as it seems! Unscripted is really tough as you need to think of an easy straightforward way of saying things that you cannot come back and elaborate on. When you start off in front of the camera, people just say "be natural"...however, that isn't quite right as you really need to be aware of, and control, your movements. Staring at the camera with a fixed smile for a little while after you have finished speaking isn't what I would call natural! But if you don't quick movement looks really odd and it is very hard for the guys to edit the footage.
Anyway, it was great fun despite the circumstances and I look forward to seeing the result!
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