Catchin' on up

So, as usual I am playing catch up (Because it seems once I get a break form TMC the last thing on my mind is writing about it) So please forgive me if I am a little hazy on what happened 2 weeks ago, so much has happened since then! After this post I will try and find time to blog as events happen.


So on with the show….

So the weekend came and we shot a whole lot on Saturday at Greg’s apartment. This was the first really intense day of shooting we had that was not in NY. All of the shots that were planned were night shots in the script and we started shooting at 12 noon. Because of this Kelly and Zach tented the windows and we made it appear as if it were nighttime. They did an amazing job, because mid shoot I went outside and was blinded by the light. The whole day was very disorienting, because it felt like it was dark out the whole day.

The whole shoot went well. Of course it was not without its share of opportunities, but we did get a lot of great footage.

This was my first weekend shooting with the very talented David McLaine (Shamus). He really nailed his stuff, and boy was he creepy! Its always fun to have him on set because he makes everyone laugh. Bobby was hitting his marks as usual, so that was awesome. I also had Jess come down for a few hours to be on set, get used to everything, so on Sunday (he first scene) she wouldn’t be so nervous. I think having her come and be on set helped her a lot

People not being prepared for the shoot caused the majority of opportunities on Saturday. We started about an hour late because some departments had to go out and get props in the morning. By the 13th hour we were all getting pretty cranky and tired. It was especially hard for me because I was drained, yet I had to keep everything up-beat so every 10 min or so I would get up and try and cheer everyone else up, let everyone know they were doing great. I think it helped a little.

In hindsight the main problem was we did not have any breaks scheduled besides lunch, and on a 15 hr day that just isn’t going to cut it. So after the shoot when we all sat down for a meeting we realized that we need 10 min breaks every so often on long shoots. These breaks are essential to keep moral up and energy and sanity up.

After finishing at 2am we all went home, only to sleep a few hours for the next mornings 8am call.

The next day went relatively well. It was Jess’s first few scenes and after a few warm ups she really nailed it. When we broke for lunch was when we ran into a huge opportunity. It was just poor organization, no one knew what time lunch was, people were split up, people were out of contact, it was just a mess. We ended up losing about an hour of shooting time, just trying to get everything organized again. It was hard because a lot of it derived from the 4hrs of sleep everyone got.

But after lunch we truly had mother earth on our side. We shot a scene in the woods and the lighting was just beautiful, it was truly a sight to behold. We went out to the woods with minimal crew, while everyone else was over at the next location setting up. Once we were done we moved over to the next location and shot one last scene before the sun went down.

All in all it was a good weekend. Technically we only missed our day by 1 scene, however given that we only had a turn around of 4hrs it wasn’t as successful as we would have hoped. But we certainly learned a lot, and we captured some great footage.

After the weekend we had a big crew meeting to discuss the opportunities we had run into. We spoke about too many people being on set distracting those who were working, and a multitude of other things we had to work on. The meeting was very productive. I like how we are all getting to the point were we can just air our problems to each other and fix what we need too. We are at the point where any problems we have with each other can be spoken about in a group setting without anyone getting personally offended. We all know that we need to let our concerns be heard so we can improve upon them and become more efficient.

With that said we moved on to the next week of shooting… in NY.