Well…I knew Saturday’s shoot was going to be interesting. It turned out to be one of the most exhausting and rewarding experiences I’ve ever had since I’ve started making movies. For those of you who where there, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your hard work, patience and dedication. I know we ran a little later than expected, but we got some pretty damn good footage in that time.
For those of you who weren’t there, I’ll try to recap as best as I can remember…it’s still all a little fuzzy at this point.
4:45 PM – Chris, Rob and I arrive at Andre Farms. It’s starting to get dark, so we go inside, start scoping things out and bring in all the gear from the Celica. The store is pretty busy so we try not to get in the way. It’s starting to get dark out now, thank God for daylight savings time!
5:45 PM – The store closes at 6:00 so I start setting up the initial shot, which is of Rob and Chris pulling into the Quick Shop and parking. Erik, Angela and Tom eventually arrive. Everyone’s here…except for Anne :-/
6:00 PM – Closing time, so I start shooting the first scene. Anne’s still not there yet and I’m starting to worry. I had totally forgotten about the bridge that was under construction not 100 yards down the road. So that meant we had cars constantly turning around in the Andre Farms parking lot, asking for directions, trying to get in the store…ARGH!
6:30PM – Anne arrives and we’re well underway in shooting the first scenes. We get interrupted every once in a while, but we get the outside dialog scenes done fairly quickly. I wanted to get both outside done at the same time, so we head out back to shoot the scene where Hunter runs out the back of the Quick Shop screaming. The back of Andre Farms is dark as all hell, so we spent some time throwing some light on it so my camera could actually see something. For the scene where Hunter runs into the woods, we had to use the 650 watt “brighter than the sun” light, which worked really well. We finally finish the outside scenes.
7:45 PM – So after almost two hours outside (my fingers are numb), we finally headed inside to do the interior shots. I figured things would go a lot quicker now that we don’t have all those cars interrupting us, right? Yeah, right.
8:00 PM – After an initial attempt at using my Poor Man’s Steadycam to shoot Chris walking into the store, I make the executive decision to cut all moving shots and just use the tripod. In the end it was a wise decision…the camera was just too heavy and coordinating me and Erik with the boom pole was just too much. Oh well…we still have some moving shots.
9:00 PM – Finally making progress, but slowly. We’ve made it into the back now, and Ted has laid out some blood, livers and pig intestines on the table for us. Yuck and awesome all at the same time. 🙂 We start shooting the scenes in the bathroom, and decide to just go ahead with the audio inside the bathroom even with the fan going. We had me, Chris, Anne and Erik in that bathroom with a boom mic, camera and clamp light…talk about a tight fit!
10:00 PM – Now it’s getting late, and we’re shooting the scenes where the lights go out. Of course the light switches are all the way in the back of the store, so we had to use hand signals to Tom in the back to tell Patty to turn off the lights. That goes pretty well, and I run across the street to shoot the same scene of Chris and Rob banging on the door.
11:00 PM – Time to shoot the most technical scene of all…Chris crawling on the ground, then getting up to see Tom and Rob in the window. I tracked Chris on the ground with the skateboard dolly, then had to lift the camera up to reveal Tom and Rob. We probably did about at least 10 takes of this, and I don’t envy Chris crawling on that floor 🙂
12:30 AM – We just finished shooting the final scene of Tom and Rob talking about how they tricked Chris. We did three takes before we realized the bottle of fake blood was clearly in the shot. My wife pointed out that maybe that’s OK…because it was all fake after all. We’ll see come editing time if I keep that in.
All night I had wanted to shoot some scenes of the Celica driving by to intersperse in the opening dialog scene between Rob and Chris, but we were all just too damn tired to do it. I’m going to shoot those scenes up at Ron’s house next week, and hopefully in such a way that you won’t be able to tell it’s not Rob and Chris in the car 🙂
1:30 AM – Arrived at home with Rob, Chris and Anne.
So there you have it…three shoots down, one more to go. As I was telling everyone that night, the last bedroom shoot is going to be a cakewalk compared to this night’s shoot.
I will be meeting up with Tom next week to do a little ADR or looping. I wasn’t really happy with the audio we recorded for his one scene, so I’m basically going to record him saying his lines again. Next Thursday is our last shoot, other than getting the drive-by scenes at Ron’s house. I will post some more after next week’s shoot. Until then, have a great Thanksgiving and…run for your life!
