Blog 2: Week of 11/21/21

Alright, Blog number 2. It’s been a pretty long and crazy week. It was the week of filming my short film, Spaced. Some day it will be posted on here, but that will be a while sadly. So let’s talk about the week. I’ll give a quick rundown. It was the last week of school before thanksgiving so all the classes were pretty slow. In my guitar class I had to play a song, so I preformed From the Dining Table by Harry Styles. I have played it before, but not for a couple years, so it was nice to revisit it. All the other classes had nothing, which was nice because I could entirely focus on my short film. On Wednesday night the actor that had been my lead for about a month informed me that he “would not be available to film” anymore. This meant that all day Thursday was spent trying to find a new lead a day before shooting started. That was bad enough but the mother character texted me saying she was sick and could not be there either of the days as well. So, now I had to find two new characters on a cast of four. I finally got a new lead character, but I did not have the same luck with the mother character. Around 9:00 at night the day before filming I made the decision to re-write the short film so that we did not need the mother. This meant two scenes were now entirely different. Thursday night after re-writing I redid all the pre-production necessary to start shooting the following day.

That leads us to Friday. I woke up early and made sure I had all the props and food ready for the day and then met some crew members at the equipment pick-up. We loaded up three cars/trucks full of equipment and headed to location. After unloading at drop off, Cade and I ate lunch as we talked through the day. All of a sudden it was time to start the work. We filmed the dining room scene first and it took a long time to get the scene ready. Most of this was spent setting up lights while I worked the lines with Silas and Logan. This rehearsal time was one of my favorites of the entire shoot. Silas (Jack) was so funny. In between takes we would name new types of Pokémon and try to get the wiggles out by running around outside doing Ultimate American Ninja Warrior challenges with the grips. We finally wrapped Silas’ scenes around 9:30 at night, and it was pretty evident that he was tired. He was absolutely fantastic and a real trouper. We then shot all of Logan’s scenes with Miquela as his stand in. Hopefully it is not too obvious that the over the shoulder shots of Jack are actually Miquela in his lion costume. We ended the night with the one-shot of Ryan going from his room to the road. We had a problem powering both the Taredek and the follow focus so we had to shoot the one-shot without being able to change focus. It took about 4 tries, but we got it, and I love the look of it. We then had to pack everything up and we were finally able to leave at around 3:00 in the morning.

Saturday came and I was dead. I woke up at 11:00 and could barely think. I sent out the call sheet and updated the pre-production pages to be accurate for the day. I bought new food for Crafts and then headed back to Friday’s location to get some folly work finished. I also used this time to fix the space helmet which had been dropped. Eventually Cade and Andy met up with me to start loading equipment into cars to take to Woodway Park for our bench scene. There was a problem with the address I sent out so everyone ended up at a nursing home. Thankfully no one else was at the park so we were able to take over the location to ourselves. When the actors showed up (at 8:00) we found out that one of the mics had been blown out due to a certain someone yelling into the microphone trying to be “silly.” This set us back a bit, but we were able to get going and finish Silas’ scenes before 9:00. We then spent the next two hours with Ryan and Julia’s scene there, but were unable to finish due to a cop rolling up and shutting down the set. He threatened citing us if we were not gone in nine minutes. We will have to come back at a later date to get the last two shots. When we were about to leave the park my car decided to die, so Alex and I had to stay back while the rest went to set up the final scene. It took 40 minutes for my truck to finally start working again which was miserable. The cop stayed the entire time, sitting in his car, with the lights on, not helping anyone. The final scene (spoilers) to shoot was the kiss scene at the very end. This was my first time to ever direct an on screen kiss, so I was pretty nervous. We rehearsed the scene down the hallway while the crew set-up for the shot. It was kind of surreal to watch two people kiss multiple times while I added small things to the scene so it would be how I wanted it; “I think putting your hand on her cheek will look better”, “can you hold the kiss a little longer?”, and whatnot. But it looked great when we were able to actually do it on screen. I am super happy with how it turned out.

So now it’s Sunday and I slept in. I woke up at 11:50, rolled out of bed and watched the Browns barely beat the 0-8-1 Lions. I facetimed Garrett so that he could watch the Texans game and it was nice. It’s been a good Sunday. Now I am going to go to 7:37 and then watch a movie with Andy. So that’s all she wrote. It’s the start of Thanksgiving break so I will get plenty of sleep this week. Bye!