1 Q, 1A

From Michael Sellers

Just had a question come in from one of you which I answered in an email. It occurs to me I should post it here for general info.

Q: When filming EOD didnt the company use a film group who were awaiting another film (Pirates??) and get them to film EOD dirt cheap? If that is true, how will WOD get the same quality of camera work within budget?

A: We got a few things from Pirates — most notably the trailers for our actors — and we got a marine coordinator but we didn’t get him dirt cheap. We just saved on his hotel and per diem since he was already there — a savings of perhaps $2,000. The underwater cameraman was Peter Mano from Miami (not from Pirates) and we had to bring him and all the camera gear from Miami so Pirates didn’t figure into that. Every little bit helps and overall Pirates probably helped us save $10,000 or so in production costs.

Going forward we have Paul Mockler who is an even more accomplished underwater cinematographer than Peter Mano — and Paul lives on Grand Bahama Island when he’s not traveling doing IMAX and other films. (We tried to hire him last time but he was off on another shoot.) I don’t know if you saw the pic of him on the blog with the IMAX camera underwater. He’s brilliant and the fact that he’s resident there in GBI means we’ll save on hotels, per diem, and some of the equipment rentals which we won’t have to bring from miami and can use only on the days we need them, not having to rent for the entire period as we did previously.

Looked at more broadly, there are going to be a number of ways in which we can save quite a bit the second time around simply because we know what we’re getting into and thus the “provide for unknown contingency” aspect is eliminated. For example — right off the top we’ll be able to shrink the number of US crew who have to be flown out to Bahamas from 50 to about 28, and that’s a very substantial savings since aside from salary differential and hotel/per diem, there is also local transportation and so on to consider. I’ve been running some of the numbers on that and it looks like a $30-40k savings in that area alone.

I’ll be writing about ways we can save in the blog so I won’t go into it all here.

Best,
Michael Sellers