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...