Terrortory 2 - The Main Story Day 4

Monday Day 4

They're either texting their parents to say goodbye, 

or perhaps their agents to ask 

"What the hell have you gotten me into?"

I woke up feeling refreshed and not sore at all!

That is a gigantic lie. Just figured I should start off different. I once again reload all the equipment I took out of the car the night before. I fill the cooler with water and ice, and put that in the car. You know, the exciting things involved in filmmaking.

Head on down to the site. I hustle into the woods and get a quick scene done--it's just Cutting waiting for a second in the woods, then he leaves. It's four shots. The humidity is fogging up my lens again. It's super hot--and it's only 8:15 in the morning.

Then we head back to the parking lot, where one of the girls for the next scene has shown up. Then the other two girls show up. We head to the OTHER parking lot for a separate section of the woods and start shooting.

The girls seem game, and cool to do the scene, which I have to shoot awkwardly because it involves prosthetic effects added to their faces at intervals, and then more walking.

On a side note, I sometimes think these actors who have never worked with me will look into my casting notices and then look me up. They see I've done some real movies, things that can be actually viewed. They've got professional posters that look like real-budget movies. Then come to set expecting things like "hair and makeup" and "P.A."s, and in general, a crew.

Since Bounty my sets are more like a college film-shoot headed up by a film geek with not a lot of friends. My crew on this one consisted of LITERALLY two people, Zig and my brother Mike. That's it. We lugged all the equipment in, and anything we couldn't, the actors stuffed in their backpacks. Joe helped out more than an actor should, frankly, and Cutting even carried stuff besides his orange chair. The days Matt was there, he helped out too.

I don't, for the most part, like talent carrying shit. They've got other things to deal with.

But the low budget coupled with my reluctance to ask people to come work for free are both striving to put me in an early grave. Frankly, I think they should work harder.

Ziegler and FX artist Mark Wenger.

Anyway, we shot half the scene then ate lunch--my brother went to the deli every day and got whatever people wanted. So he's doing P.A. work too. Also, they know him at the deli so they treat him pretty well.

We get done and we're not far off the schedule. While we were eating lunch I decide to move the location of the next scene from way off to about 200 feet up a hill from where we are. Because I'm dying.

It's a big Smiling Jack attacks scene. Tess comes back--she was one of the kids earlier. She's super cool, and has no problem falling down, getting her face smushed into the ground over and over, and just in general having fun. I wish I was young again so I could have some fun too, but apparently it's very hard to de-age yourself without drinking the blood of babies.

(and even then it's a very slow process, and babies don't exactly grow on trees)

Will, Matt, Cutting, Tess, me and Zig.

 My brother's taking the picture.

We have a couple of effects that look like they may work, but every time I shoot Jack when he moves his head, I start to have flashbacks to how much frame-by-frame compositing work I have to do to make it look like his head is hollow.

We have one final shot, and we wrap--about an hour late again(at 7pm instead of six). We drag all the shit out of the woods. I'm good to just go home and fall down, but Cutting and Zig and Mike seem to want to order pizza from the local shop that has REAL good pizza, so I say sure. Mike goes to get it, while Cutting and Zig and I go to my parents house to sit on the deck. (Okay, I went in the pool for a couple of minutes, in my jean shorts and all)

We ate pizza, sat there and chatted until about 9pm. Then home to do the normal routine.

We're watching tomorrow's weather because we have a complicated scene to shoot about an hour away from any of us, then we gotta come back the other direction for 90 minutes and fix that first drone shot that was overexposed. A thunderstorm is supposed to be rolling in in the middle of the day. If it moves one way or the other, we may be able to shoot it.