Filming Recap: Day Seven, 02.22.09

In this feature, we follow the production of "Reminisce," our latest HD project, completed MUCH earlier this year. Behind the Scenes of Reminisce: The Prom Sequence, Day Three - Later That Night.

Picking up right after the prom, and leading right into some of the scenes shot the day before, this shoot day featured Terry taking Ashley home to let her sober up, and then he has to face a couple of interesting dilemmas...

We also shot the second half of the phone call, paying very close attention to the energy levels, making sure they matched what we shot the night before (an issue which didn't work out quite as well for the phone call in "Writer's Block").

The other element of the day was that, in the scene we shot on the 14th, Terry showed up without his bow tie or his buteneer, which he wore at the prom. Which meant, we had to explain away where they went. Wasn't actually that difficult, since he stays up all night, and would untie the tie, fidget with the buteneer, and probably lose the cumber bun as well (which I can't remember now if we did or not), but it was still something we had to keep very careful track of, to make sure we didn't betray the continuity. We did pretty well.

It was a lot of fun, though. The actress who plays Ashley was such a hoot. Unfortunately, we don't have a whole lot of pictures from this day. The reason for this was that we had a lot more crew members on set than we needed, or even could really fit, so we sent half of them home after about an hour, including Jeffrey, the one taking most of the pictures. It was a shame, though, because apart from all the fun we had shooting the scenes, we ended up doing a gag take at the end of the day, and I wished the rest of the crew could have been there for that. But, it'll be on the DVD, so they'll get to see it there.

These were the last scenes we shot of The Prom Sequence. 12 scenes later, we made it through. And then we had to get ready for the other big set-up of the shoot: The Reunion (What can we say? We love those crowd sequences...)

Filming Recap: Day Six, 02.21.09

In this feature, we follow the production of "Reminisce," our latest HD project, completed MUCH earlier this year. Behind the Scenes of Reminisce: The Prom Sequence, Day Two - The Prom.

Once the set was built, we just waited for our actors to show, and then we could film as soon as the sun went down. Here's where the first hiccup comes in - We had arranged for many, many extras to be there, so as to best fill the space. 10 showed up. The crew had planned to show up in tuxes and dresses of their own just in case, but even with that we still had a disappointing amount of extras. We called everyone we knew, and got a couple more people down, and when we added those to the crew, we had about 20.

During all of this it had started to sprinkle, and at this point we had moved on to light, irratic drizzling. The courtyard we had built the set in came with tarps that can hang in between the buildings, and we already had those up. So, no major damage was being wraught upon the set, but we were not without concern. Fortunately, the rain never got much worse than that, so the worst of it came later.

We shot the band first, as they play for the crowd. The song is "Guitars," an original by my former drum teacher, Terry Carleton. It was a song I always planned on using for this scene, and when I played it for Andrew he absolutely agreed. It has exactly the feel we were looking for, a sort of '9os power ballad. The band was great, and the crowd did an awesome job as well.

After we finished with the band, we did a shot at the photo booth. Astute observers will notice that this is where I slipped in my cameo. I pointed out that, with my beard in full swing, I looked the least like a high school student of anyone on the set, aside from the band. Andrew agreed, and tossed me behind the camera in front of the camera.

After that we moved on to a few shots near the punch bowl, with our actors and some dialogue. We don't have any more pictures from filming for this day, but it was excellent. We ended up letting the extras go after the scene near the punch, right around 10 pm (which is what we were aiming for). After that, we went on to shoot an intense scene between Terry, Hannah and Patrick. From there, we shot 2 more Patrick/Hannah scenes, and one scene between Terry and Ashley (this was the actress' first scene on the shoot, and she was a hoot). 

We ended up staying out there until 2 am. The last scene, a Hannah/Patrick, had us shooting half of a phone call, with Terry and Ashley on the other end, so all 4 actors were still here at the end of all things, and, dispite the lateness of the hour, were incredibly gracious. At this point, we asked the actors who were gonna be on set the next day (when we were going to make up last weeks shoot) if they wanted to cut the day so they could sleep (they had an early call). Troopers that they were, they decided instead to stick to the schedule. Actually, it's not that they were troopers, they just seemed to have boundless stores of energy.

We all adjurned to try to fit in about 4 hours of sleep.

Filming Recap: Day Six Prep 1 (02.21.09)

In this feature, we follow the production of "Reminisce," our latest HD project, completed MUCH earlier this year. Behind the Scenes of Reminisce: The Prom Sequence, Day Two - The Prom Prep.

So, this is gonna be more than one post (and yes, I appreciate that I've been slacking to a preposterous degree on finishing these up). Today we're talking about the set-up for the Prom Proper. I'm just gonna leave you to the pictures - you'll get the idea: Karli, our production designer, RULES.

Next up - SHOOTING.

Filming Recap: Day Six, 02.15.09

In this feature, we follow the production of "Reminisce," our latest HD project, completed earlier this year. Behind the Scenes of Reminisce: The Prom Sequence, Day Two - Terry's House.

So, this is another not-filming day. Had to push it back, I believe because of weather again. We had to push it to next Sunday, since Saturday would be full of Prom set-up and shoot. Fortunately, for your indulgence, I give you guys a little treat - the photo storyboards for the Prom Sequence.

Filming Recap: Day Five, 02.14.09

Behind the Scenes of Reminisce: The Prom Sequence, Day One - The Morning After...

We began the prom sequence with the last scenes of it. The first scene featured Hannah leaving Patrick's house, and was our first major outdoor shoot to happen in the early morning. The reason this makes such a difference is that the morning is when all the birds are the most chatty. Right before "action," we had to kick the tree nearest to the house to try to get the birds perched on the branches to quiet down some.

Then we moved on to the next scene, with Terry confronting Hannah. Big scene. The Prom Sequence is essentially the linchpin of the movie, essentially a movie in it's own right, and this scene would be the climax of it all. The actors really brought it, faced with the daunting task of handling massive emotionally charged lines, referencing stuff we hadn't yet filmed (which was sort of the case through the whole shoot, but no where more than here).

The day was essentially pretty smooth. Next: The Prep for Prom.

Filming Recap: Day Four, 02.08.09

In this feature, we follow the production of "Reminisce," our latest HD project, completed earlier this year.

Pushing yesterday's work back to today meant that this day would go long, and we all knew it going in. That said, it was still a pretty fun day. Filmed the first 4 flashbacks, which is kind of cool, all things being equal.

The Time Capsule Scene

The first scene, Scene 9, was the first flashback, of young Terry, Hannah, and Patrick filling the time capsule. Also the scene where we first meet Patrick, and get to see Terry's first thoughts on asking out Hannah. This was probably the single non-Prom scene we spent the most time on in the writing process, trying to make sure it was right. (We did spend a lot of time on a bunch of the scenes in the Prom Sequence. But since the Prom Sequence was 12 scenes in the script, it's really an animal of it's own...)

The time capsule scene was shot in my on-campus house, in our kitchen. Once again, Karli delivered a stunning set-dressing performance, as she managed to turn the kitchen of a bunch of college slobs into one you could really see a suburban family living in. This was a fun day, since I think the Christian Bale rant had broken during the week, so we ended up talking and joking about it for pretty much the whole rest of the movie.

I don't think my roommates had any idea, when I told them I was shooting a movie there that morning, that I was referring to a crew of over a dozen and a whole bunch of lights. A couple of times they would come out of their rooms, look around in confusion, and then go back into their rooms. A couple of them also didn't understand how good our mic was, because sometimes they were still talking loud enough that we could hear them without the headphones.

After the kitchen scene, we headed down the road to shoot the next flashbacks: Terry asking Hannah out, and them returning from a date.

Outside Hannah's House

In a continuing confluence of awesome, we made a crane out of a cherry-picker. This made Josh, our DP, look suspiciously like a foreign dictator. Then, his leather jacket and gloves, coupled with a pair of my sunglasses, he looked like the Terminator.

In the pictures, you'll also notice super-grips Alex and Tadashi (who we had taken to calling "Tuck and Roll" at this point, since they somehow reminded us of the pillbugs from "A Bug's Life") serving as stand-ins for Terry and Hannah coming back from the date, and then getting carried away with their role...

Once we finished the scenes that took place outside the Hannah's House set, we headed to the cafe on campus, the Centrum, to film another date between Terry and Hannah. A date like any other, until Patrick makes things a little more interesting...

Dinner For Three

Since the Centrum closed on weekends, we had it to ourselves, so we patiently prepped the location as we waited for the sun to set. We picked out plates, slathered them with food, and dressed the tables. This was also our first scene with extras, though all of them were either crew members or family of the crew.

As the Script Supervisor, I'm always struggling to find a place from which to watch the action, but also stay out of the way of the cast and other crew members. Not the easiest task on some of our sets. Fortunately, I was able to set up shop behind the salad station, and lay all my script pages out on the counter.

Once the sun was down, we tried to figure out how to light through and against massive, incredibly reflective glass windows. Once again, Josh and his team of talent succeeded in an impressive feat of badass.

While this day did have 4 set-ups, it wasn't nearly as bad as our shoot on the 1st, because we had a lot more time to work on each location, and didn't need to worry about running as far to each set.

Satisfied with a job well done, we turned our attention to the next task before us: The Prom Sequence.

Filming Recap: Day Four, 02.07.09

In this feature, we follow the production of "Reminisce," our latest project, completed earlier this year.

So, this day isn't actually a filming day. It was supposed to be, we were supposed to film at my on-campus house/dorm thing (the school has a handful of houses, and me and my roommates were in one this year). But we all got up, looked out the window at the gathering clouds, and realized the weather would not permit filming. We could tell it was going to rain, which would have rendered the audio unusable, not to mention make it difficult to move equipment. And that's just for the scene we were supposed to film indoors.

We called the actors and let them know not to come over, then did the same for the rest of the crew. Really glad we did it, since it ended up hailing later that day. That really would have been an audio issue...

Tomorrow comes the real day four...

"Writer's Block" honored with 2nd place award

So, this week has been a nightmare of essays, projects, and tests. That's right, finals week. However, I got a happy reprieve from the chaos when the on-campus video festival screened "Writer's Block," (the movie I shot, re-wrote, and reshot freshman year). What was even cooler was that the movie got 2nd place.

Now, obviously this festival isn't really Cannes (much to my professor's chagrin). A bunch of the other projects were just bad experimental films, and a couple of the others felt like they were written by high school students. There's no awards based on categories, such as directing or writing (which I didn't actually care about, but my professor pitched a mini-fit over that).

And the movie itself, though I do think it works, is really tough for me to watch. I just want to reach into the screen and re-direct the whole thing. I'm not happy with a few performances, and the sound could probably stand to be re-mixed.

But, at the risk of sounding petty, an award is an award, and in all honesty it's still sincerely pretty cool to have people honor the movie.

Plus, $30 gift card for Best Buy. I'm gonna try to save that for the next time I need to buy HD tapes. I'm gonna fail, but still.

Filming Recap: Day Three, 02.01.09

In this new feature we catch up with the production of our latest, "Reminisce," a while after the fact.

The third day of filming had us seeing 4 scenes, which is kind of a lot of set-ups for one day...

The first scene of the day was the second-to-last in the film, a quickie of Terry leaving Hannah's place. While there were only 3 or so shots, the scene was still a feat of lighting ingenuity, because any silks or bounce cards had to be kept out of the reflection on the car. We have once bounce card that we covered in aluminum foil, for certain lighting effects, but at one point during the morning, Josh asked for another. I'm pretty proud to say, I quickly took action and grabbed another one of our many bounce cards, the aluminum foil, and a handful of C47s, and MacGeiver-ed up a new one.

After that, we moved into one of the dorm hallways, and shot the first scene in the film, of Terry getting dumped. This scene was tricky to light in the more traditional sense, as we just had to try to cram all of our equipment into a narrow hallway, and try to find enough outlets to avoid blowing out any fuses. We had the actress who played Liza come in, who was great. It was a real shame she was only here for the one scene, because she was a real joy to work with.

The third scene of the day was the final scene of the film. Since Terry is an art teacher, we shot the scene in our own art teacher's on-campus studio. This scene was also a challenge to light, but in the opposite respect from the one before. This one was just, how do we get light into the room in creative ways. Obviously, we had half the studio to shine lights from, but we also ended up tossing a light in through a window, which wouldn't be extraordinary, if not for just how high up the window actually was.

The scene itself was a big kissing scene, and we wanted the actors to feel as comfortable as possible, so we ended up going with sort of a 'closed set' approach. As soon as the lights were up, anyone who didn't need to be in the room during the scene was relegated to one of the other rooms. A couple of crew members ended up dozing off in there.

This scene was our first with Elliot, who plays Terry's roommate James.

The last scene of the day was the second scene in the film. Astute observers will notice this day took care of the 2 scenes on either end of the film, which is kind of weird and cool (except when you think about that pretty much all the other scenes in the film are either flashbacks or just Terry and Hannah in her apartment). For this set, we were in a severly cramped dorm room, but, if you look in the picture, everything in it, all the books, the bike, and the tacky decorations, all of that was set dressing. Our incredible production designer Karli was responsible for all of that, and while it might look haphazard, she actually picked books for a reason, and about 3/4ths of them are books on art or teaching, books that someone like Terry would definitely have.

This scene was our last with Elliot, and was a good scene to end with. The cast gave us a couple of cool improvs in this scene. Maybe not usable material, but certainly good for keeping the crew in good spirits after a long day of work.

Once the scene was done, we thanked Elliot for his hard work, and the rest of us coordinated on our plans for the next weekend's work.

Filming Recap: Day Two, 01.31.09

In this new feature we catch up with the filming of this latest film long after the fact.

Second day of filming started with the scene where Terry and Hannah dig up the time capsule.

The scene itself was pretty short on the page, but shooting outside is always an adventure. First of all, we were right next to a highway, and sometimes kids would ride past on their bikes, and stop to watch us filming. We kept having to tell them, "it's okay if you watch, but if you sit right there, you're right in the middle of the shot, so if you could move a little..."

Also, on the other end of the field the university was doing some construction of some sort, so they had a big truck over there, and every time we rolled we'd hear the beeping of the truck backing up. It would go for about 3 minutes, then stop for about 30 seconds, then go again. It was like the truck was parallel parking, and just couldn't get into the space. At least, that was our theory.

After we finished the scene, we headed back to Hannah's apartment set and shot the rest of the scenes in that location. About 5 scenes in there.

Fortunatly, those five scenes take place in one night, so the costumes didn't change, but we did have to change the lighting every time, and the scenes, while each one was really short, maybe a page or two at max, did have to have full coverage, so the scenes did take a bit of time to get done. We ended up filming a while, a bit longer than we planned to, but we got some great footage. The cast was on the ball, and the crew was starting to get into a cool rhythm.

Crew members I didn't name in the last pics:

Jared and Michael - crew

Karli - production designer

This was our longest weekend, and with Day 2 over, we hit the hay to get sleep, knowing Day 3 was only hours away...

Filming Recap: Day One, 01.30.09

In this new feature we catch up with the filming of the latest film long after the fact. The reason we waited this long was not out of sneaky secrecy... just busy and lazy.

First day of filming, we did one scene, between Terry and Hannah in her apartment.

Since we were only doing one scene, the idea was it would go a little faster. However, this is the first day, which means it takes the longest. We had a bunch of people on the set who'd never been on a set before, and we had a DP none of us had worked with before, so the time issues were sort of expected.

Josh, the DP, was excellent. The cast was totally cool, and it was excellent to start with a quiet, mostly light scene between Richie (Terry) and Nicole (Hannah), since most of the stuff we shot in the film would primary be more serious scenes between them.

Overall, not a whole lot to say about this day. We did go about two hours longer than planned, blew out one bulb, and had a few mic issues, but all in all it was a decent first day.

After filming, we let the actors go, and Andrew and Lauren thanked the crew for their professionalism, and prepped them on the schedule for the next morning.

The crew you see in the slideshow:

Andrew - director

Lauren - producer

Josh - DP

Travis - sound

Trevor - key grip

Alison, Kelly, Alex and Tadashi - grips

Mike - script supervisor

Jalessa - apprentice script supervisor

Ben - behind the scenes documentarian

Jeffrey - production photographer

We had a couple of other crew members on the film who weren't there on the first day, so I'll point them out in the upcoming slideshows.

Day 2, coming soon...

We've been filming all this time...

Unfortunatly, I haven't had a lot of chances to get back here and tell you guys all about it. The other reason I've waited is, simply, I don't have any pictures. As soon as the shoot is over, I'm gonna get my hands on all the pictures we've taken on the set, and start posting blogs for each day of filming.

Again unfortunatly, that may not start until another couple weeks from now, but hopefully you'll endure the wait with me.

Courage!

From Pre-Production to Plain Old Production

We start filming tomorrow.

That snuck up a little bit...

Fortunatly, we're all totally on top of this movie, and the shooting schedule itself is not at all arduous. We're filming pretty much every weekend in February, but each day is not so bad, and the days don't really stack up against us at all.

Now, that's not to say that this month has been without it's hitches. There have been a proposterous ponderance of producer politics, but rather than go into all of it (which I wasn't around for anyway), just a couple of quick updates:

- Andrew, our Senior producer, is no longer our Senior producer, but the director of the project.

- I, obviously, am no longer the director, but the Script Supervisor (in addition to being the writer)

Now, you may ask: But WHY?

Answer: Producer politics.

Now, there were other reasons, too. Since I'm no longer the director, I have a lot more time to focus on writing projects for next year, which is essensial given the way the class has been going this year. Also, Andrew hasn't directed anything over the past 3 years, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with my film.

I was telling my friend all of this, and he felt bad that I was "demoted" from the directing slot. But the truth is, I'd be a lot more upset about it if Andrew didn't get the movie just as much as me. He understands the movie, and actually sees the same movie I do (often down to the shot), and it's all about getting the movie made. I would shave my head to get this movie made.

(I'd probably start at the bottom, though, and work my way from the chin up. I'm not crazy.)

Welcome to 2009

So, it's been a couple months since I posted anything new. But I have been pretty darn busy...

So, let's talk about "Reminisce." When last I checked in, it was mid-November 2008. Since then, the script's been rewritten seven ways from Sunday, but it seems like we have a final draft in play.

We start shooting at the end of January. Once that happens, I'm gonna start posting pictures from the production, maybe even a video or two.

In the meantime, we're gonna start working on a bunch of pre-production elements, including storyboards, so I'll try to post some of those before filming.

Until then, you can catch a few tidbits of script here.