Day 2.

Today started earlier than I wanted it to. Nicefield called me at 10 am and my sister woke me up, which she knows is a cardinal sin before noon. (Not because I’m lazy, but because I have hell trying to sleep with my back and if I don’t get a full 8 hours my back muscles ache all goddamn damn). I was just getting back to sleep when Tom called and she woke me up again. Then she decided to shut Darwin in my bedroom and she started knocking all sorts of shit over, clawing at the mattress, just being a pain in the ass. Finally I managed to get back to sleep when Tony from Tony’s Food Paradise called. Tony’s Food Paradise was originally where we wanted to shoot the film, when Pat Rourke was supposed to play Al. I dropped off a screenplay to him with some notes and all that like 3 weeks ago and he never got back to me. He probably saw the blurb in the Times Herald and thought “shit, I missed the boat.” He left a message saying that I could call him and we could “work something out.” Fuck that guy.

Around 2:30 pm the Eppley brothers arrived. Katie, who had read about our project in the Times Herald and wanted to help out, arrived around then too. I feel kind of bad, because we didn’t really have much for her to help out with, seeing as how the first scene of the day was the exterior running sequence where no lighting was needed. While we waited for Steve to get there, Todd and the Eppley brothers (with some help from Katie) rigged up our light to create the effect we wanted for the last shot. Originally, we thought we were going to have to drill a tiny hole into the ceiling, and we really really didn’t want to do that. We thought of trying magnets and all sorts of stuff, but to our delight we didn’t even have to resort to anything. There were already a few holes drilled in the ceiling from something else and they were able to rig up, with wire, a harness for one of the lights.

It was pretty tricky to get the first shot going. We wanted to do a few dry runs but Steve needed some time to get prepared and Ryan, Steve and Todd’s roommate who drove the electric cart and totally helped us out, had to have the cart back by 6. Plus it only had limited juice. We got one full run without Steve, one run with Steve in the cart, 2 aborted runs (one the shutter shut on me and the second we lost Steve in the shot and got a whole bunch of seat belt in the frame when we got stopped at a red light) and the actual run. I was pretty nervous about it. For one, we didn’t know how long Steve would be able to run, and two, because we didn’t have battery juice to make an extra run, I didn’t have a chance to frame Steve up and get some practice moving in and closer to him. Finally, on the third try we got a pretty good start before Steve had to stop about 0.2 miles into the 0.8 mile run. We didn’t get it in one take but I think we got some pretty good stuff and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think your average audience is going to put up with an 8 minute, single shot scene anyway. I think we’re going to get some more side-shot scenes around town, maybe under the Blue Water Bridge.

After that the Eppley brothers went to grab some food at Quay St. Brewery (where we had to borrow an ash tray, thanks guys!) and Steve, Todd and I had some Bangkok Star, which was delicious. After eating we figured out some lighting stuff and after a bit Lusk arrived and we were ready to shoot.

The shoot proved extremely problematic, but we got some good stuff. While writing this blog I actually stopped to work on editing the footage and it proved to be great stuff but will be hard to work with because of a few factors that I’ll have to take into consideration for the rest of the shoot. The first is continuity with smoking and actions and lines when it comes to cuts, some of the good cuts had Steve smoking right after a line and I couldn’t find a good splice. Another problem was the location of the Jameson’s bottle. But the biggest problem was the audio. During the third take of Scene 9, angle A, this shitty ass band started playing at the bar next door and we could hear them on the set. We had to stop shooting it got so bad. And then there were the drunks outside. I’ll write more about it later and post some video, but for now, I must sleep. It’s 5 am and we meet in 6 hours, which means I’ll be lucky to get 5 hours of sleep. Here’s some shots from the bounty.