Row-Row-Roanoke: Part 2

Last night we returned to the water to film the model boat sequences, with our new ideas in tow.

Once agian, it rained the instant we started to shoot.

Luckily, with the new structure in place, the boats (and Dan and Gary) were not hit by a drop, which is more than can be said for the rest of us.

Despite this, the night went well. The new structure did its job by isolating the smoke from the smoke machine, the new boat lights that Gary fitted looked great and we think we got some very good shots.

And all of this was done in time for us to watch 'Match of the Day' to see how our fantasy football players did!

Unfortunatly I don't have any of the photo's that were taken last night but I'm sure Angela and Bertie will add some later on.

Winter Shooting

With the re-shoots of the boats happening this Saturday (and a whole new infrastructure being built) I am continuing to work on the InfoZone (a section that will let anyone know about the project, from the basics) that I hope will be up by the beginning of next week. If you do have any questions you feel should be answered then do let me know. I have also begun work (after a weak break) on the pre-production for the winter shoot.

Using the 13 page document from Sam, I have compiled a structure of shooting for the winter. It involves around 5 further large locations, and two studio set ups. We have the studio available to us along with 3 locations (thanks to a variety of scouts), I am currently working on two locations that could make or break the production. I estimate, similar to Sams earlier predictions, we have 67 odd scenes to shoot, however some of these are cut in regards to editing and therefore 3 scenes could = one shot in regards to shooting time. It's looking very possible, and the rushes are looking fantastic.

On another note we added:

An independent film production company (BSDS Productions) are currently half way through filming working title: Roanoke The Lost Colony - Roanoke The Movie. Release date set for March 2007. Further information can be found via the website.

Onto Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit) and subsequently a search for Roanoke The Lost Colony brings us into the top page on Yahoo and top of the second page in Google.

Back to Boating

The re-shoot for Roanoke: The Lost Colony that will be happening this weekend will see the team stepping back into the water, donning their wetsuits, and filming the model boats again. Since the last shoot everyone (especially Angela) has been on the ball thinking up new and intriguing ways to shoot the models and to make them look more and more like, well, not models.

The first idea will be to form a wire frame structure across the water and then cover the frame with a dark material. This will help take away any lost light and retain the fog around the boat for alot longer. In the previous shot (as can be seen by the picture below)
Dan used an umbrella to harbour the smoke and waft it across the boat. Although the umbrella tactic may seem quite comical it was infact a primitive form of the method we will be using this Saturday. We will also be using a large sheath to fend of any unwanted rain drops, darker material to cover the bright blue flooring and a sturdy stabilizer for the boat.

To the latter end of this week Gary will be working hard by touching up the boats. The two main areas he'll be working on are the sails and adding interior lights (miniature lanterns).

Although officially we are on our publicity stage, we need to get this re-shoot out the way before the adverse weather kicks in.

On a separate note, Dan brought around the Publicity DVD today, it is fantastic, better than that in-fact. We have made a few changes and we will then send out to everyone who has requested it.

Roanoke the Movie - Preparations for Winter Shoot

So, the summer shoot is over and as well as starting publicity and playing fantasy football we are getting ready for the winter shoot. (Though it’s mostly Bertie doing the latter!) Though a while ago I typed up a list of how many scenes we have left to shoot, and I thought I would share this with the blog.

I have counted 67 remaining scenes (though Bertie will probably have counted something different!). Most of these are fairly lengthy scenes with a lot of dialogue, but there are some that are shots of people at work and on the boats, and there are some that are just of John White (character name) looking out to sea, or in a room by himself. All of these have no dialogue, and should not take long to shoot.

In addition to the 67 scenes, however, there are some pick-ups of some of the scenes we have shot already, and there are some additional elements we need to shoot, such as shots of the sky, or open fields.
All of these will need to be filmed, but as there are no actors or crowd, they are not as important and can be shot any time.
We are also going to have another go at the model boats; we think we can make them look better!

Hope that has been informative!
P.S. Bertie is being very cocky about winning the Fantasy Football; so do join in just so we can beat him!

A bit of something fun on the side!

While we all are busy taping away at e-mails and programming for the pre-production stage and publicity we thought it would be fun to start up the Roanoke Fantasy Football League for all cast, crew and followers of the blog.

How it Works (brief)
Fantasy Football (soccer) allows you to pick 11 players from the premier league, each week when the teams play in real life your players will gain points for goals, clean sheets (shutouts), assists and loose points for red cards and letting goals in. You have 55 million to spend and each player is priced (normally depending on their ability and status).

Currently alot of the cast and crew have signed up to the metro.co.uk Fantasy football game, it is 100% free with a chance of winning 15,000 at the end of it.

If you register, pick your team and honestly think you can beat us (or not), then click on Private League and enter:

- League PIN: 6881 so you can join the "RoanokeTheMovie" league and compete against us and then also against the whole of the English

If you want to sign up, or just simply read a bit more (it's very simple) then go here, remember it's free!: http://fantasyfootball.metro.co.uk/

We look forward to chatting with you on the message board and seeing how your choice fares.

In the meantime i'll get back to finishing the Info Zone for release this week, and at the end of today tell you about a re-shoot we'll be doing this week, it involves getting wet, again.

Publicity - Phase One

So while the Press DVD is finished by Dan and we embark on the new weeks ahead of us, one of my main jobs is to make sure that people can find the site and blog if they search for it. According to reports (of people who can't have much to do with their time) if your not in the top 10 search results on Google, you have little chance of getting seen. This is mainly because the majority of web users are too lazy to scroll back passed the second page, and don't "trust" pages that aren’t at the top of the list.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled a number of searches we would like people to find us on, and over the next few weeks we'll keep track to see if we can improve our ratings. I've been following a few for a few weeks so I can say today how we have improved. We may appear more times after these results, but the numbers relate to the first reference to our sites 1. rtlc.blogspot.com 2. http://www.roanokethemovie.com

SEARCH WORDS |||| WHERE WE STAND |||| LAST WEEK
1. roanoke the lost colony |||| Page 3 - 22nd |||| Page 13!
2. roanoke the movie |||| Page 1 - 3rd |||| Page 5!
3. the lost colony. |||| 26+ - then i got bored |||| -
4. roanoke |||| similar |||| -
5. lost colony of roanoke |||| Page 11 - 106 |||| -
6. film about roanoke |||| Page 1 - 7th |||| -


We feel that people who may be searching for the story of Roanoke should come across our page with these keywords if we can make it to the top! So that is our aim over the next week or so. There seem to be some good results already there, but we need to improve on the simpler terms such as jusr "roanoke" and "the lost colony". Otherwise the 2 page one results the search for a film or movie about roanoke are promising, and the top search shown there is getting better and will hopefully be a very general term people would search for.

For visitors from america, we are also putting Google Ads on the right hand side of google search pages in a bid to make a few more people aware of the project.

How can you help?
If you would like to help us get further up the rankings and own a web page, by adding a link to either http://rtlc.blogspot.com or http://roanokethemovie.com with the title of Roanoke: The Lost Colony, Roanoke The Movie, or something similar, could help us rise up the search links. The last thing we want is our link to become spam, so please don't post the link aimlessly, and please only put it on if you feel the effort and work put into the project so far deserves the attention.

Roanoke The Lost Colony (Trailer)

Take 2



Finally after alot of reading (which has proved to be quite educational) the trailer is online, in a good quality format, streamed, and looking and sounding nice. It will now be available for viewing at any time via the "Media Centre" on the right hand side.

You can also download the trailer, along with other options such as versions fit for your mobile phone and your video Ipod.

I suggest any Dial Up users choose to download (rather than stream) a broadband video as the compression is alot on the Dial Up page. The best quality is the one under the title "Broadband High".

The format is in Quicktime which means all computers are able to play it. Hopefully you will be able to get a more pleasurable viewing experience than the smaller Windows Media file before.

Now that is out the way we can move forward to pre-production for the winter, the InfoZone, and everything listed in the post below

Plan for the Next Few Weeks

While the exporting of the trailer continues to give problems, here is a brief plan of what will come on the blog over the next few weeks, along with the usual posts.

The List - just a few

- Trailer in full quality for broadband users: High, Medium and Low - Quicktime
- Stats and Figures of the progress of the film over the first shooting set.
- Full Picture Set
- Locations needed to film
- Roanoke InfoZone - full information about the film and production of roanoke
- Updates with the promotional work.
- Update on future locations (as set out by locations needed earlier)
- Crew Interviews

Press Release coming...

So while Bertie's been working his socks off trying to figure out all the variations in encoding a high res version of the trailer (and by jove i think hes almost cracked it, look out for high res trailer release soon) ive been sussing out a different software, playing around with DVD creation and preparing what i like to call an official press release DVD.

It will basically include a high res version of the trailer, Angelas sublime making of video (only with her permission of course) and photo slidshows from the shoots so far.

It will be a fully functional professional dvd with active menus etc, to show that its not just about the quality of the film but the whole package.


I personally believe a movie is a whole package and every element of it needs to say 'wow' to the viewer, which includes DVD menus, DVD covers, posters etc. So look forward to your first chance to see some Roanoke treatsaway from the actual film itself as we move into a month of promotional work and attempt to get Roanoke the word on everybodys lips....hopefully!!!

Download Update

Roanoke: The Lost Colony, Roanoke The Movie

Slight mishap with the exportation of the better quality trailers, it turned out to be a dot something file which no Media Player could read, so I'm going to stop trying to be clever and just do it normally and in QuickTime. As I'm working during the days for this week I'll hopefully have something up by 10/11pm tomorrow night, should all go well.

We have had a great response via e-mail and stats for the first 24 hours. We had 150 hits to the blog within the last day and over 100 unique downloads of the trailer. Thanks to everyone for watching and I hope you enjoyed it/found it interesting to some extent. Hopefully, as said above, I'll be able to get a better quality version up soon. Considering we have done minimal, nearly no publicity for the film as of yet (that comes now), it's a pretty good achievment.

For those who have requested a DVD it should be out in the post at the end of this week, or if your unsure what I'm on about, see the post below.

Sam has done a great job in sorting out all the scenes we still must shoot and has prepared an amazing document which lists just that. Now it's the case of starting pre-production work for the winter shoots but this time knowing we have a great team behind the production (that's not to say I ever doubted they were great in the first place.....You get what I mean)

All the best,

Bertie