There comes a time in every production when you just know that you're going to lose your cool. You can just see it coming and there's nothing you can do about it. We had so much film to do on Day Eight, that the cool-loss was inevitable. But the end result, if that's what we judge things by, was that we got all the stuff we needed to get.
Because of scheduling conflicts this was the only day where we could shoot the Masters of a great many really long shots. For those of you who don't know, the Master shot is the entire scene from beginning to end. So for a complicated scene that might take five minutes, you have to go all the way through it until you get it right. We had five Master shots to do in one night, and that was only about 1/3rd of all the shots we needed on Monday.
But we actually got through those fine. We had pretty much done all the complicated parts of the shots beforehand, so the Masters themselves were more of a longer repeat of the same material. The most we had to do was two takes of a Master before we moved on. Then there was a long series of short shots, people saying a line or two, over and over until we got those right. Where we started to break down, however, was in a scene that was almost entirely physical - the break out scene.
First, it had to be lighted. We did two takes of one part of the scene where our "hero" appears on screen bathed in a red light and looking incredibly sinister. This was fun and delightful, but it was also supposed to be something that only appeared in the imagination. The first part of the scene showed our heroes crossing the empty social hall bathed in moonlight. We accomplished this by the simple expedient of rotating the "moon" to follow them across the hall. But when we got to the last part of the scene, the wheels finally came off.
It was a simple little set up. A fight breaks out between the security guards and the escaping patients. Its a one sided affair as the patients only have toy weapons. The Han Solo character even runs after the guards and chases them around the corner, only to be zapped by tasers. But with the moonlight set up and the dark hallway, some of the scene was lost in shadows. As we'd all been working our butts off up until this point and as this was the most exciting scene of the entire night, after the first take, everyone was pumped. And that was the problem. Take six pumped college kids in a room and let them get excited and you have total chaos. There was good natured swearing and cheering and hijinks going on on one side, while on the other, my entire film crew was telling me not only that we had to reshoot the scene, but that it had to be this particular way or that particular way - none of which had anything to do with the scene I was trying to film. I finally lost my cool.
I don't even remember what I said, but I snapped it out like a drill sergeant. Then I snapped at the actors to be quiet (they were very loud and were yelling un-church-like words). And then I walked away for about ten seconds to collect my thoughts. And that was it. I came back, listened to my film crew, made a decision and we reshot the scene with a slightly different angle on the moonlight and a different posture of the main actors, and the scene came off brilliantly with only minor changes. But I felt bad and very unchristian at that moment.
Though I apologized afterwards, I really had to question my motives for making this film and I had to remind myself that my motto going in was, "If it ain't fun, why are we doing it?" But in the end, it was watching the footage that we had filmed that night that finally did the trick. Maybe there needs to be a certain amount of chaos on any film shoot in order to get good work.
Still, it made me realize one thing... the sooner we're done with this film, the better. The proximity fuse has been lit and its only a matter of time before things really blow up. I'm going to try and get everything done on the next shoot (everything except Sunday's shoot) so that we can have a bunch of days off in a row. A little break would help us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment