Big thanks to Joe--I was thinking the next morning that I wished we'd recorded some of it, and Joe tells me he got a bit. Awesome.
In case you're wondering why we took the next day off, I knew it would go late into the night and all our other shoot days start at 8am. No way were we shooting Thursday night until Friday morning at 5am, then working three hours later.
Anyway, the report continues...
Friday, Day Off
Friday, I woke up sorer than shit. For some reason a few of my toes are numb in spots. Like, I walk and it feels like something is stuck to my toes, but I check and there isn't. It's the numbness that makes it feel like that.Today is spent re-designing Saturday's shot list to be a little less ambitious, and to include a few multi-camera shots that will hopefully mean we end on time. I have us shooting from 9am until 6pm, but I'm not positive at what time it will be too dark to make the scene seem consistent.
I have to gather all of the props, recharge the drone batteries, the camera batteries, the monitor batteries, clear the cards, make a few notes in thislog(which I flesh out later into what you're reading now) and all the other little minutiae of filmmaking.
Saturday, Day 2
Joe and Cutting, pretending to have fun
We got a slight break in that it wasn't as hot as it was supposed to be, but it was still humid as crap. Lenses that came out of the carrying case--even though they'd been in the woods for 4 hours--still started fogging up. It was cloudy out, which was nice--with the sun, you have to constantly battle highlights and differences in the light for consistency--cloudy is sweet, especially since I have very fast lenses.
We shot the first scene no sweat. We did part of the 2nd scene, and then the actors showed up. It's a group of "kids"--three guys and one girl. We set up for their shots, and knock some out. Get that scene done. We send Mike to go get us lunch before we're done, but the deli is slammed so we decide that while we're waiting for Mike to return, we'll go knock out the next scene real fast. It's only four shots.
Get that done too. Man, it's all going so great that I'm thinking, "Too good to last..."
Tess and Colin(two of the kids) walk out to her car so she can drop something off with her dad, and Mike shows up a minute later. All of us eat. We're wondering where Tess and Colin are--they come walking toward us from the OTHER side of the trail. They've gone the wrong way and circled way back around.
By the time we're done eating we're only 10 minutes late to start. The sun comes out. It gets very hot. The actors get chatty in between takes. This is something you always get--actors wanna talk to other actors about acting. It's expected. But they really gotta pay attention to what I'm saying, because when I have to repeat myself to come over and act in their scene, well, I get pretty fucking cranky.
At some point during this there's a bit of...drama, let's say, between my brother and Mark. My brother's a super laid-back guy, so I don't know what the issue is at the time. Let's just say it turns out Mike's not interested in helping out on FX any more.
We do some drone shots--it's working fine. I discovered what the problem was. At night the drone can't use its own cameras to figure out where it is, and if it also loses its GPS signal--which it does because we're in no-man's land, then it switches to a really shitty mode that makes it drift, and ignores
you on the joysticks. And you can't turn that mode off, which makes a lot of the people who own this very unhappy, myself included.
I joke that all of my future movies will be shot with me sitting in a chair, operating the drone camera. Because I'm shooting nearly zero tripod shots, which means I'm holding a rig all day long. Wanna try it?
Take 5 pounds of anything, then hold it straight out in front of you. For like 90 seconds. Then you can rest for a second, then do it again. Do it three or four times, then take a five minute break. Then repeat it OVER AND OVER, but for some of those make sure you get down on your knees for some of them.
Also be 46 years old and in terrible physical shape. See how you feel.
We have what I guess you'd call a stunt. It involves someone taking a beer bottle to the side of Smiling Jack's face. Suffice it to say that with complications and my doubt that we can get an intact sugar-glass bottle half a mile into the woods, I concoct a plan to use a REAL beer bottle upside the side of Jack's face.
I first try to weaken the beer bottle in tests. It doesn't work. Then I figure--you know, if we tape a big piece of steel to Jack's plastic head, and the bottle hits there then it's gonna shatter. Matt won't feel anything other than a slap to the head.
So we do it on location. Brandon is game to try it(he's the actor swinging the bottle). He does it. I'm in the path of the flying glass and feel it hit me. No biggie. Matt's not hurt. But oddly, out of everything I considered, I never figured Brandon might take any shrapnel that would hurt him, but the back of his hand was bleeding.
Not a lot, and he was game for take two. So we have two good takes. On the second take I got hit in the arm by a tiny piece of glass and started bleeding a little. I really wouldn't have thought these shards would be sharp enough to open up a cut just by flying through the air but there ya have it.
We do a couple of FX shots. The first one works pretty well. I'm liking. The second one is a mixed bag. The humidity makes it hard to stick an appliance on the face that stays, so we sorta improvise. I'm not sure how it'll look once I edit it, but I'll make it work.
We're scheduled to shoot until 6pm--we wrap at like 7:10.
This was the largest group of people we had on
at anytime in the shoot.
From Left To Right
There Is No Way I'm Naming Them All
Side Note:
I had a tiny worm, of all things, burrow into my skin. I thought it was just a tiny insect, then I pulled and a 1/4 inch worm comes out. Now the area on my leg is getting all red, and it hurts. What the fuck was that?
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