Friday: 9:30am-11:00pm
Saturday: 7:00am-12:00am
Sunday: 8:00am-5:30pm
So needless to say, I'm a bit worn out.
Friday fortunately didn't start too late. Though it's not as late as you may think, since the location was over an hour away, so I had to leave home at 8. Which, in the world of film, still isn't that bad. On the way I had to stop and buy some more tapes, because I realized late Thursday night that we only had two left, and going through three in a weekend wouldn't be unreasonable. (And in fact, we did.)
We started outside at a park for the last scene of the film. We were in the desert, but it was cold and windy, go figure. Cold to the extent that between takes the actors wanted their jackets, since the costumes were designed for real desert weather. At least it was sunny, though. After we wrapped at the park we went to the motel that was to be our home for the next two nights.
The motel experience, location-wise, was awesome. We used a couple of the rooms for shooting, slept in them at night, and were right there to start in the morning. We didn't have to worry about packing up equipment, driving home or back... it was actually a nice luxury.
The actual shooting in the motel, however, wasn't easy. Saturday we had a lot of scenes to cover, and for the first time (other than the night scenes) we had to worry about lighting. The motel rooms are the location for the majority of the emotional content of the film, and I wanted to be able to capture some of that with the lighting, which meant that we had to take time to make it happen. The difficult part for me was getting used to the time it takes to set up lights. We've been doing mostly daylight exteriors up until now so going from setup to setup is really quick. Once we started with lights, I started getting nervous about whether or now we'd be able to get everything done. To add to the pressure, Saturday's scenes contained some of the most intense emotional content of the movie, so the actors (Jodi in particular) had that on their minds.
What this added up to was that I had a lot on my shoulders Saturday. On this kind of production, where the producers are also the actors, it pretty much falls on me to make sure we get everything finished. I can't take my time and let it fall to a producer to keep an eye on the clock. I've got to be constantly aware of squeezing the best quality product out of the time we have.
As a result of the hectic day and my being particularly stressed, there was a bit of drama at the end of the day between myself and the sound mixer. Towards the end of the shoot (nearing midnight) I got a bit snappy when talking to people, and he got offended.
When everyone on the set is putting in long hours and doing it for free, it's important to make sure they feel appreciated. And I understand this full well, having spent some time as an intern and/or unpaid PA. So I fully understood where he was coming from being upset. Of course, that being said, I felt like I had a pretty good excuse with the stress of the day on my shoulders and ultimately the responsibility for the film resting on me. But we talked it over, drank a few beers, and after a semi-decent night's sleep all was well again.
Sunday was good, at least for me. We moved to a nearby bar to shoot a couple of scenes and it went really smoothly. The customers (the bar stayed open) were very cooperative, keeping the noise down when we needed. And the owners of the bar let us do whatever we needed. We blacked out the windows, took over a large corner of their eating area, had lights and people and equipment... but they were totally cool. By the afternoon everyone was pretty worn out, but I must have gotten a second wind or something because although I was tired I was a lot more upbeat than I'd been at that time Saturday.
Long story short (too late, I know) we finished the last shot around 5:00, packed up by 5:30, and I was home an hour and a half later. I feel really good about everything we did this weekend, and I'm looking forward to going through the footage this week, but I'm always a little anxious until I actually see it, because I'm paranoid that somehow what we did didn't work (one of the tapes was faulty, the camera screwed up and I didn't realize it, etc).
Funny anecdote from the weekend - Saturday afternoon we were in the motel room and I was looking around and didn't see the camera. I thought I might have left it in the other room, so I asked, "has anyone seen the camera?" Stu, the DP looked at me and laughed, which made me think they had hidden it as a practical joke. I asked him again where the camera was and he pointed, I thought, across the room. In actuality he was pointing directly in front of me, where the camera was sitting on its tripod.
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