The Black Balloon’s finale “Afloat!”

Autistic children, lots of colours and a Home & Away star in a monkey costume – just another day on set! Well not just any other day, it was the filming of “The Black Balloon’s” finale “Afloat!”, which the musical performance within the film.

In the film, Charlie (Luke Ford), is performing in a musical at his school called “Afloat”. (a musical of Noah’s Ark). Charlie and his friend Russell (Firass Dirani) are playing broadway wannabe monkeys. Many of the other animal characters in the musical are played by real children and teenagers with autism. This on one hand, was a big challenge for everybody, but on the other hand was such an amazing experience. It was just fantastic to watch!

With Luke was also Rhys Wakefield, running around in a monkey suit all day. Both Luke and Rhys are pretty cute guys but to see them dressed as monkeys really looked funny! By the end of the day everybody was singing the song they had to dance to (affectionately called ‘the monkey song’). Not only did the song stick in everybody’s head for the day, we were still singing it for rest of the week!

My job on the day was helping to coordinate the extras and I can tell you one thing - there were extras everywhere – 200 to be precise. All dressed in early nineties fashion, so there was a lot of fashion flashbacks.

Elissa’s (the director/co-writer) parents came down from Queensland to see how things were going. And there were a lot of other guests on set, like the investors and distributors. And everybody seemed to enjoy it. Especially the performance of the autistic children in their colourful costumes. Claire, the Costume designer and her team did a great job.

Because there is always some confusion around the Crew Roles, I thought I use the Tech-Fact to explain some of the ‘hard to guess’ ones.

DOP – Director of Photography or Cinematographer. He/she is working closely with the Director on the look & feel of the film. They colloborate on what lenses to use, how to frame a shot and what would be the best lighting. The DOP doesn’t always operate the camera, but most of them in Australia still do.

Best Boy - there are two kinds of best boys, either for lighting or grip. They are the assistants of the team head.

Gaffer – he is the head of the electrician department. Gaffers basically make sure that whatever vision of lighting the DOP has gets actually done with the equipment that is on set.

Ok, I think that’s enough information for today. Maybe I do another crew explanation next time.

Cheers,
BeeBee