The fun begins

This week is a very exciting week for me. I went on a location recce on wednesday, all the way up to Ipoh (about 2 or 3 hours drive from KL, the other side of the large mountains of Genting and Cameron Highlands) to check out the subject matter of my documentary. Adam (the D.o.P) came with me, and it all went amazingly well. We met up with our main contact, who wanted to suss us out before he agreed to go ahead, as I rekon him and the other people we're going to interview have been burned by vulture journalist types and put off by lots of shoddy local production houses offering to come and make a big pile of crap. So the fact that we're both very nice and honest professionals, thoughroughly decent chaps and a good deal more intelligent than the average Malaysian who works in TV production sold it to him.
We're going back in a week or so to meet the lady he has been protecting from us (and all the other chancers)and to set a date within the next couple of weeks to start shooting our interviews. Yes.
Adam looked really excited with the locations, and now and again I could see him scooching down and squinting, a good sign that he's getting into shooting mode, selecting lenses and angles in his head.
He has a crew of lads he works with all the time, and like myself he refuses to hire crap people, or work with them twice if they aren't up to scratch - all these boys have done stuff for National Geographic, big adverts, Discovery channel and a lot more besides, so we are on with a top-notch crew. And everybody is not only doing this for free, but we're all going to pool our money together to make this the best we can possibly make it.
Aren't I the lucky one? Mega excited, and more than a little bit tense to make sure it all go's well. Palms sweating. I've managed to track down a few more octagenarian interviewees, and am in the process of convincing them that it is essential that they do these interviews. I am refraining from saying "come on love, you're 85, you'll be dead soon so what harm can it do, eh?" as I feel this is the last resort in Timbo diplomacy.

So, there we go. Everything is going much, much more smoothly than I could ever have hoped for. Adam and I were talking in the car on the way home, and I was a bit worried that it's all just going too smoothly so far (touch wood, I have no desire to jinx this) and we came to the conclusion that we're so used to dealing with utter, utter arseholes (TV people, advertising people, theatre people) that it's just become alien to us dealing with people who are actually nice human beings. How jaded we become hey.

So this is going to be the first of many Timbo documentary productions, the first of many indeed. Watch this space and love to all