THANK YOU MOTHER NATURE....

The rains came in the afternoon for the final day of shoot for Ep 11 but in the evening, the stars came out and gave us a perfect 10 hour dry windown to complete 14 scenes!
It wasn't what I would call a perfect night - who in their right mind would try to shoot 14 scenes - all difficult scenes - in ten hours!
As such, and due to the time constraints, I cannot use tracks as it would take away precious minutes from our schedule. So it was simple pan shots, zooms and sometimes, jib arm shots. nothing elaborate.
However, by 3 am, I was already cranky shouting at artistes who suddenly seem to lose the ability to act (these were mainly the extras whose body language were completely off).
Nevertheless, by 6am, we shot our last and final scene - and young Farah (the Sofia Jane look-alike) had to endure a 6am swim in the cold cold waters of the Langat stream. She took it like a real trooper (pic above shows her just after he early morning dip) and we wrapped at 6.30am just before the morning sun greeted us.
It was a new day too and not a happy one as we were also greeted by increased fuel prices. Today, it will be RM2.70 per litre. I can remember just a few years ago when it was less than RM1.50.
I don't know what the impact is in the next few weeks, but I assume it would be quite massive. Prices of other items will increase and living expenditure will become heavy.
For producers, the increase in prices will become a burden - our profits (if any) will dwindle if RTM does not increase their offer prices. As it is, artistes fees and outstation shooting have become too expensive. Nevertheless, RTM will not increase their prices because both Astro and TV3 offer much less. Therefore the assumption is that RTM is paying more as a social service to producers because the producers are already making a hefty profit from RTM.
Unfortunately, this vicious circle will never end unless all three stations sit down and standardise their purchase prices.
Soon, I will post an entry that simplifies the economics of producing for these stations so that the public will know why they are getting sub-par productions for their viewing pleasure, and why the low quality of productions is not always the fault of the producers.
This evening we cancelled our shoot in Putrajaya for Ep.12 because of logistics and locations problems and I decided that it would really be much better to shoot the episode in Melaka. So tomorrow morning at 10am, we would all convoy to Mini-Malaysia in Ayer Keroh, Melaka, to begin shooting the episode. In this episode, Eman Manan, Harun Salim Bachik and Marissa Yasmin will be participating.