i am sparticus: Discipleship Explored Filming
Discipleship Explored Filming
The Crystal Palace National Athletic centre is designed with one thing in mind; Communist Russia. Not only the bare rusting concrete assembly (as TV's Barry Cooper pointed out already) but the way the stands are designed to concentrate all the available bitter wind into one particular corner of coldness. And that's the corner we've been in for the last hour or so, in shorts and running vests, walking backwards and forwards between the stands and the starting blocks. Apparently this makes for good TV.
Then we get released for five minutes. That's probably not true. It's as equally likely to be three minutes. Or possibly seven. It's all a guess. The only time it's likely to be is the exact time it takes to fumblingly put a pair of tracksuit bottoms on to try and get warm. Here's another thing about filming other than the cold. Hilarious outakes: They don't actually happen, because you know, you don't want to screw up and so you don't. At least not in a funny way. Will Smith might naturally get hilarious outakes, but I assume that's because he's Will Smith. You're not. Here's another thing. To make a few minutes of TV you've got to film a few hours. And when those few minutes are us sprinting around a track, that means a few hours of us sprinting around a track. Doing the 50m repeatedly doesn't seem too bad until the next day when you can't stand up and realised that 50 metres times forty shots is two kilometres of sprinting.
As for reporting on the actual event we're there for, you know, the whole Discipleship Explored filming thing bit, it turns out we missed it all. I mean, we were there for the whole-stand-around-on-a-track-and-feel-cold-bit, but the bit with the whole actually-speaking-to-the-camera-and-telling-them-about-Jesus-which-let's-face-it-is-the-entire-point-of-this-filming, was all filmed the day before. There were a few scenes left to film with TV's Barry Cooper in it, but alas they used the standard celebrity film technique of keeping the TV personality as far away from the extras as possible and not telling us when they're filming him in the background. Still he was good enough sport to let me take photographs of him with make-up being put on. He wouldn't sign my t-shirt though.
Enough about that. It's a week later and my legs still ache and I still feel slightly embarrassed from trying to fill my frame into a running vest and shorts, but on balance I'm glad I did it. The bits of the filming we saw did look very smart and it is all going for the production of an awesome Christ-centred series.
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TVs Barry Cooper
This'll be no consolation, but I had to climb a flight of stairs five times during the filming of one episode. I was walking like John Wayne for the rest of the week.
But you won't feel the pain anymore when you become TVs Mark Walley. Think of the huge fee you'll command. And you'll be able to fire members of your retinue just for making eye contact with you.