Pyjama Girls - The Story of ‘Pyjama Girls’_Production Diary 3

From Hell to Heaven. Indeed?

Finally the 2 long months of preparation for the shoot are behind me. The whole stress of getting the Pyjama project completed has now lifted, but it’s left me on the floor like a flattened balloon.

But let's start from the beginning.

Our 'Big Tuesday' turned out to one big paranoid day, driving from one place to another with stupid hope trying to find a new character for the weekend's shooting. We ended the day with 5 minutes of footage.

On Wednesday I decided to give our initial character a call but she had to work all weekend. We decided to offer something in return for 15 minutes interview. Surprisingly it worked. One girl agreed to give us some time during weekend. I felt so happy and more relaxed now...

Friday became tougher. In the morning one of our crew member stated she couldn’t turn up. After that I tried confirming our interview with one of the girls but I couldn’t get through to her. At the end of the day I realised that we have no shot lists ready and no questions list prepared. I felt like I was in the middle of an earthquake.

I felt so helpless... but quickly afterwards just one sentence came to my mind... the sentence that my academic priest said once to me, when I had a moment like this: 'Remember that the most beautiful flowers sprout on the shit'. That made me a little bit stronger and I just started ROTFL on that whole 'funny' situation. By the end of the day almost everything was sorted out.

Saturday started with some stomach ache probably because of all the stress. Our meeting was called at 9.30. Girls were supposed to be at the cafe at 10, but I found no living soul at the agreed place at the agreed time. Shortly before 11, I got one of the girls on the phone, saying that they were on their way. I sighed with relief... shortly after 11, at the most crowded, loudest, busiest time of the day we started shooting our cafe interview. We did quite a long interview with the girls. Turns out the recorded sound was totally crap, that we needed to do another smaller interview with each girl separately. Hoping the sound would be better.

After shooting cutaways in and out of the cafe we moved to Meath Street, where the magical Liberty market's atmosphere greeted us. There we met lots of fascinating people and one really nice, charming man who gave us an interesting interview. Our exciting day full of fun and flush on our faces came to the end giving us a great feeling and experience.

On Sunday the plans totally changed.

The first character didn't turn up, so our whole shooting day around the city centre didn't happen. Being in the heart of the city we decided to do some shots on Henry Street – girls including Kiara, Julie and myself turned up in pyjama bottoms, but unfortunately Rene and Jimmy were hardened opponents against wearing PJ bottoms in such a public place like Henry Street. Well that again went against my plans as I wanted to put our PJ crew in PJ's as a credits rolled at the end of our film. However I did some nice shot of pyjamas falling on the ground from the air... People passing by looked at us as a mad people in all our glory ;-)

Anyway, not wasting the time we moved to St. Theresa gardens flats on Donore Avenue, where we found pyjamas heaven. All colours, patterns, shapes and people in all age wearing that sophisticated outfit. Unfortunately no Pyjama person liked to give us any opinion about pyjama subject in front of the camera. In the end, surrounded by a bunch of children, we interviewed a nice policeman and lovely local non-pyjama lady.

From that point we decided to eat something in our favourite cafe in Dublin 8, where I suddenly met a very interesting and nice pyjama lady with her dog called... 'Lady'. She kindly agreed to give us an interview. Shortly after that, we went to Stoneybatter to get some more pyjama girls, but without luck. Our shooting day drew near the end. I did some more pyjamas shots at home that I thought might be useful as a cutaway.

Finally we had full 2 tapes of the footage with the hope that we would get something suitable for our 5 minutes document. I think we all did a great job with our commitment and passion. Even the weather surprised us and there was no rain at all, despite it being forecast.

Well, after that I must admit that I felt quite happy with how things went. It turned into an enjoyable adventure and now, in heaven state of mind, I can't wait for the edit to see if I'm going to visit the hell again or not.

:-)