Sore day

No filming tonight. Schedules conflicted and my back was bothering me something ferocious anyway. But not a wasted day. Todd and I met up and setup the lighting for all the angles we need to shoot still. We're ready to rock and roll tomorrow. We'll have to get the sound running and as long as everyone's got their lines and is able to punch out some great performances, we can hopefully get a lot done tomorrow. Time is running short before Steve leaves, and soon the Welcome Center will be moving in.

George's POV

Reverse shot of George's POV

George's POV Shot

Reverse shot of George's POV.'

If all goes well, we will get the entire film shot in each of those angles in the next 2 days. Fingers-crossed. Ground control says go.

The Swede

Cliff Johnson and I discuss the scene as Steve Barker takes a ciggy break

Tonight we shot the scene between The Swede, Ole Andersson, and Nick Adams. It took a while to get the bedroom how we wanted it, and to figure out how the shots would work, given that we only had a corner of a room to use because of all the big stuff upstairs that we couldn't move. I think it turned out pretty damn nice looking. It took Steve a little while to get into character, and I think Cliff just might've stole the scene from him. He was that good. Unfortunately, I wanted to get him out of there by 10:30-11 and we were there until midnight. Part of the problem was that we had to try a few things with the lighting to get it to work just right, but part of the problem was that when we were ready to go with the lighting, the audio wasn't ready. And when we were finally ready for that...we realized Steve wasn't in his costume yet. But once we got rolling, it started clicking. At least we didn't have any out of control rock n rollers.

A bad idea...at least we got the shot.

Midway through the shoot, we had to change angles and I had to sit on a ladder, which turned out to be a bad idea. I didn't fall, but my back muscles weren't too happy with me and so by the end of the night, I was in pretty bad shapes in soreness. I still am. Luckily, the Eppley brothers and Todd and Steve took care of packing everything up. I seriously don't know what I'd do without this awesome crew. No wait, I do. I wouldn't make this movie. Just wouldn't be possible.

Anyway, shooting with Micki for the first time tomorrow. That ought to be a blast. We start at noon, so I took some tylenol PM, otherwise I'd never get to sleep.

This has been a major learning experience. For anyone who's always thought making movies was easy, I've got news: it takes a shit-ton of work. Like...exhausting. I guess when it comes together though, it's worth it. This thing is slowly coming together, I think. We'll see.

The business side of making a film

is the worst part about making a film. Technically, we should have insurance and all that jazz, getting permits, etc. But we don't have the financial means to do so. Fuck it, this shit is underground, it's nouvelle vague, it's independent of all that jazz. Anyway, because we don't have insurance and the Sperry's building is currently insured as a vacant building, they can't let us in to use it unless we have our own insurance. And while I understand liabilities and all that nonsense, sometimes a handshake and someone's word ought to be good enough. That's just not the world we live in anymore though.

I'm getting ready for the scene tonight with Ole Anderson and Nick Adams. I wasn't able to get to Pontiac to pickup Chad's "Last Supper" painting and he wasn't able to drive to PH to drop it off to me, even though he had the day off and I've done similiar treks to help him out from PH to Pontiac or Ferndale or Royal Oak or whatever. Anyway, now I'm scurrying to find one and we've got 4 hours to do so. Bah.

I'm still having some of that second guessing, doubting tomas nonsense going on over some of the shots we got the other day. I forgot about how you can't cross over that imaginary line in between cuts and there's also some funkiness of cutting from a shot with Max on the left of the screen to one where he's on the right of the screen. It's imperative that I think that kind of stuff through and not waste any more days of shooting. I think we can fix most of it with an intermediary shot, so we'll see.

The biggest thing that I've learned through all of this, is that there's so much more for me to learn. I feel pretty confident with most of the cinematic ideas I have, it's just the execution of them where I find I'm struggling to trust myself. An excellent DP and Cinematographer, on a real set, would alleviate a lot of the burden, and if it weren't for Todd, who's been busting his ass to fill both roles, I think I'd be a bit overwhelmed by it all.

Here's hoping we get some great stuff tonight. If that happens, all of that questioning, doubting, stress, etc. will fall back in line, I think. We'll see.

behind the scenes...interruptions.

Day off.

We took a day off from shooting today. I needed it. Big time. After getting home from shooting around 7 pm last night, I relax a bit before laying down in bed around 9ish. Next thing I know, it's 7 am. I got up, watched some Daily Show episodes from last week that I dvr'd and then played around with some of the stuff we shot yesterday, looking at how it played out. Around 11 am I was feeling pretty achy, (it was pouring down rain all day today) and laid down. Next thing I know, it's 3:30 pm. I guess my body needed more sleep than I realized.

I left my cell phone charger at the B&B so I had to run in and pick it up. Tom was there, and we chatted for a bit. He's a pretty cool guy and he's got some big plans for that place this winter that I wish him the best on. He helped me get some more stuff around for the Swede's bedroom scene, which we shoot tomorrow night. After that, I met up with Sadaat at the Raven and we met up with an old friend at the Brass Rail before Steve Barker joined us. During the interval between us arriving and Steve arriving, I wrote a new little scene for him. Nothing big but it'll provide a little more depth to what's going on.

I was listening to some music by The Great Fiction while I was chopping up Steve's running scene and by pure coincidence I realized how perfect one of their new songs is for it, both in terms of what I kind of thought I had in mind and the lyrical content. The song is here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0Uqr0ZwAXg&feature=related . I've gotta email Danny and Phil from the band tonight and see what they think.

So Saturday night...oh brother. Instead or writing it all out, I'm posting some video clips of what went down after they're done with converting to divx.

I was so happy with Saturday night's shoot. I cannot put enough emphasis on how pleased I am with the casting. I knew Steve would be great but not this great. I knew Lusk would bring a good performance but I had no clue that he'd be as fantastic as he is, like, he could probably be a professional actor. It makes my job a whole lot easier, when I've got incredible actors reading a script where I've tried to stay relatively close to Hemingway's dialogue.

Jim Frank (Max) on the left, John Lusk (George) and me on the right.

Sunday...oh boy. I forgot to set my alarm clock on and woke up at 11:14 a.m. We were supposed to meet at 11:30 a.m. Turns out everyone overslept a little bit. I got there around noon, and we started setting up. We had Emily coming in at 1:30 to shoot her scene, Rich Cox and Ed coming in around 3 and I didn't want to keep Lusk beyond 5 after the long night of shooting the previous night. We got some good takes in, although there's something about a few of them that I'm not too happy with. I dunno if it's the soft focus through them or the lighting or the audio or what. I think maybe I just need some variety in the angles and it'll ease my mind. Emily and Jim just knocked their scene out of the park but Emily had her hand over her face during the first part of it so I'll need to do a retake of that part, luckily we can keep the best part...her attempt at small talk and Max's response.

"Bright boy can do everything." - Max

Emily, as Church Mother, responds to Max's attempt to shut her idle chit-chat up.

So yeah, Emily did great. Rich Cox came in and I told him he should go ahead and come up with a Rich Cox-ism for his line and he did. It was fun to get Rich in the film, because he's a great guy and he's always been there for anyone when they've needed a hand. Hell, he's lending us his condenser microphones for audio for the film, which is just more proof that Rich Cox is a really cool guy.

"I'm pretty corked for time, I better split." - Joe Smith (played by Rich Cox)

I had asked my uncle Jeff to play Angry Man, but he had a motorcycle ride to go on and couldn't make it. I decided to have my dad try it, because I've seen him get pretty damn angry at times and thought he might be able to pull it off. In hindsight, it's hard for me to tell if he got the scene or if I need to reshoot it, it's very hard for me to be objective about it. Dad's made a shit ton of sacrifices and has worked his ass off to help me get through everything, and even though I get really impatient with him and we can sometimes get on each other's nerves, I know I couldn't have made it through without his support. I know it's probably hard for him to connect with me when it comes to stuff like film and art, etc. but he makes an attempt to and that's all I can really ask for. I guess I just wanted to give him a chance to be involved in this project, with it meaning so much to me, and I guess in turn, both him and mom. Wether it becomes a deleted scene or in the final cut will probably be determined with a little help from others involved who can provide a more critiquing eye.

"Aren't you running a damn diner here?" - Angry Man (Steve Riehl)

Tomorrow's going to be a big day. Got the big Nick Adams & Ole Andersson scene to do. Then we've just got to shoot the scenes with Max and Al and a few odds and ends. I'm hoping that by Thursday or Friday, we've got a lot of the Max, Al, and George scenes in the can.

It's weird, there's been a point in the last 24 hours, when I was looking back at some of the scenes and thinking "ugh, that didn't work, and I don't know why, maybe I'm not cut out for this," and then "all this effort, and hows it even turning out? maybe it's not worth it." Which I guess is probably just a little bit of natural deflation after starting out with such a bang and being so elated with the lighting and scenes we had first shot and then the let down when a scene doesn't pan out the way you hoped for and you have to go back to it. I guess, if I'm going to do this, I've got to learn how to deal with that and how to respond. I think a day off was a good remedy, to give me and the rest of the cast and crew a little time to reflect on what's gone right and what's wrong thus far and how to overcome the bad and accentuate the good from here on out.

Dan hanging out in between takes as he manned the hanging light.

Day 3

Long ass day. My back muscles feel like burnt tires. Going to nap. More later.

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.