Terrortory 2 - The Main Story Day 3

Sunday, Day 3

I don't wanna bore you with this again, but I am so sore when I wake up that I'd give you my entire silver age comic collection if you'd just let me stay home, and go shoot this for me.

We head in for the opening shot of the movie. It involves a really cool drone shot. Unfortunately it's so goddamn sunny that I can't get it to not blow out white with brightness unless I put the ND filters on it, but if I do that, then it's too dark once the drone comes through the canopy. I can let the drone compensate for it, but it doesn't look great when it does it.

I do some other shots with the regular camera, but the sun is putting bright highlights whenever my guy walks the trail and the sun shines through. It's tough. And still HOT.

And now people are having a party somewhere in the distance where you can hear them partying. And then someone runs a buzzsaw not nearby, but still--it's a buzzsaw. You can hear it. Then a dog barks for like 20 minutes straight. If I was their neighbor I would have either killed the dog, or them.

We move not very far away--I'm beginning to change locations out of convenience. Not a great thing to do, but let's face it--I spent a ton of time in the first film shooting visually-different locations in the woods, but we still had asshats being pissed because "It all takes place in the same location."

Well, first--no it's not. The longest segment of the movie takes place IN A HOUSE. There's another long scene in a warehouse. Then the actual scenes in the woods were shot in radically different places and/or times of the year.

Second, and more important--do these people get pissed when they watch Friday the 13th? Why's the whole movie take place at a camp? And then part 2 and 3?  MORE CAMP. WTF is up with that, right?

Fucking people.

We move to another scene with Smiling Jack. I'm not really feeling most of what I'm shooting, but I refer back to my own rule which is NEVER JUDGE YOUR SHIT WHILE YOU'RE SHOOTING IT.

Still, would love to have the sun go away. For a couple of days.

Then we have some on-paper easy scenes. It's all talking and walking. But Cutting, the lead actor is having a hard time remembering some of the lines, and he's getting frustrated over it, which can kill an actor on set. I pretend it doesn't bother me--and it doesn't bother me that he's missing them, it bothers me that it's so goddamn hot and my arms are dying.

I figure it's cuz Cutting's not getting enough sleep, and if the heat is boiling his brain the way it's hurting mine then it makes sense. Later, after we're done shooting I ask him about it. Because he nailed all those long speeches and exposition in Garden of Hedon, so I was surprised that these short sentence, big paragraphs would give him problems. He says it's because many of the sentences are variations on each other with slight differences.

I dunno, but whatever. We're all doing the best we can under brutal conditions. I remember thinking "Man, shooting outside in July could be bad..." but I really never anticipated it would be like this.

But here I am walking backwards while shooting Cutting and Joe walking toward me, and I have to try to walk around a trail I can't see. My brother is spotting me, tugging gently in directions to let me know where it veers, but still...hard to compensate while also keeping focus and composition.

Again we wrap about an hour late. On the easiest shoot-day we're going to have. I really thought we'd make this one. But between the heat slowing us down, the moves, the stopping for the COUNTLESS planes going overhead ruining our audio(we're not exactly near the airport), and the fact that I have to get a lot of coverage because I'm not positive of exactly what points the lines veered from the script--it all took a lot of extra time.

I actually have been going by my parents' house to jump in the pool after every shoot--sort of a chlorine insect wash. Then I head home, dump footage, back it up, start batteries charging. I don't get to bed until after midnight, and I have to be up again at 7am to head to the set.