Production Diary: Day Three

Warning: The following content may be total jibberish. Lack of mental activity will be to blame.

Previously, we have shot 9 total shots (with multiple takes of each) and have actually completed no scenes.

Last night, we were striving for 18 total shots and five completed scenes. I know we dropped one scene and, at least, three shots from the list before the night was done, but I think you can see that we had to step it up a notch over our previous efforts.

So, Day Three for me began on Tuesday as I broke down the list of shots and determined all of the actors and props and decorations that we needed. We actually had to create a bedroom set inside my church and decorate it, as well as put up our normal decorations for the main room. This required designing and printing a seven foot long banner (I may hang it in my office when I'm done with it! It looks awesome!), buying a wig, a stash of moustaches, rewriting three Star Wars opening crawls, finding a key card, digging my roll-away bed out of the closet, and many other assorted errands that took me all of Tuesday, Wednesday and most of Thursday to get done.

On Thursday, I stopped by Costco for pizzas on my way to the church, then spent the first thirty minutes or so just unloading my car (robes, equipment, bed, etc... I looked like a guy that had just been kicked out of his apartment). We had quite a crowd last night for a very few number of scenes, but I used every single person.

As people ate pizza I began setting up the music room as a bedroom. Then I removed the couch from the music room to put it in the main room and began placing equipment where it needed to go. I had added two crew members since the week before, Tom and Katy, both from City College and both extremely helpful last night as I had Tom take on a role in the movie and as I had to take the role of Harry, that meant one less crew member.

We started with Scene 2 - our introduction to the main characters and the establishing shot for the entire facility. In the scene, our hero enters the room, walks across the room while everyone looks on, and then does something that firmly establishes him as being bat squat insane. All in one take. Of course, we were missing one of the key actors in the scene, so we started by doing a bunch of cut scenes, close ups, etc... while we waited for this actor to arrive. Finally, not being able to wait any longer, we moved on to the bedroom scenes.

There are three main bedroom scenes (five total, but one is a night scene - to be shot next week - and the other takes place in a doorway) and I didn't want to haul my bed back and forth to church more than once. So we were going to film all three scenes if we had to start a Coffee IV and stay until four am. Unfortunately, I was in two of those scenes.

Um, though I'd been working on the film straight since Tuesday, I hadn't actually opened the script to read my lines or anything. I wasn't concerned because, having written it, I was pretty familiar with the character and the sort of dialog he had. What I didn't count on was the fact that my brain had disengaged around 4:30 that afternoon. It took me about an hour to scrape through the first scene with many embarrassing retakes as a line of dialog that I had just said fifteen times before would suddenly hide somewhere in my brain behind the nudie mags and rocks. Anyway, we got through my first scene (only later did I realize that it was the first actually completed scene in the entire film) and we moved on to a much easier second scene that only took four takes. Finally, I was done with acting and could change hats again.

That was when our luck started running out. The last bedroom scene took nearly 9 takes and with our best actors because just when the plane stopped interrupting the sound, the cell phone vibrated, and then the fire engine went by and then the janitor turned on her radio and then... well, you get the idea. Anyway, we spent way too much time in the bedroom - but when we were done, we had three scenes finished.

Finally, our actor had arrived and we were able to get the master establishing shot that we needed (only four takes) and the last close ups. And that was when I called it a night. We were all exhausted from the filming.

I'm not quite sure why its such exhausting work. Perhaps there's a level of focus I'm not used to in my normal job, or its the combination of coordination and artistry and technical wizardry that is so taxing. Whatever the reason, I always come home with a body that feels like its been through a marathon and a mind that's racing like its been dosed with LSD and sleep is difficult. Of course, I have to go to work the next day and its always a bear, but I simply must endure.

Next week, I have shooting days on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, so I should be just about ready to kill someone by Saturday night. That might require a mandatory "Director's" meeting at Joxer Daly's pub in San Francisco after the shoot ;)

Until then, I've got three days to get it all organized before I'm right back in it.

Have a good weekend!