If you’ve ever worked on an indie film set you know that things are always going to take longer than planned. A scheduled 12 hour day easily turns into 15. That’s just the way it always is. However we had a bunch of friends and other folks volunteering for 2 consecutive weekends and I promised them 12 hours days and damnit I wanted to keep my promise! Spoiler: I did. For the most part.
Now the very first setup of the shoot is always the hardest – it can often take a couple hours to get things rolling. There’s staging the scene for the first time in the location, lighting the location for the first time and of course makeup. It’s agonizing because you’re wondering how you’re ever going to make the day when one shot takes two hours. But not on “Thwackers”. I had scheduled the actors a bit later thinking that lighting is always the hold up, but after 45mins Glenn, our trusted DOP, said “Okay, ready, let’s shoot!” Whoa, that was a good sign. Except that we had to wait for makeup to finish. Whoops, my bad.
We basically planned to shoot all of episode 1 on the first day except for one or two odd shots. This meant a little more movement with the camera than we did the other days but that’s the way it goes. One of the toughest things in scheduling is that you want to make the shooting as easy as possible but at the same time you don’t want to have actors waiting around. Since we had our Mr. Pellegrino scene it meant we had to build the wall and shoot all his scenes so he didn’t have to wait around all day. Luckily Glenn was a whiz at lighting so it didn’t even slow us down that much.
I have to say, Day 1 went really well. I don’t actually remember a lot of the specifics about it – we just plowed through everything. I was a little nervous as a director but tried not to let it show however I do remember one point during Mr. Pellegrino’s scene that really freaked me out and made me question if I could pull this off. This was probably the scene I had planned out the least since I didn’t know how wide of a shot we could get. When we looked at the location with Glenn and the camera a week or so before shooting, we hadn’t yet built the wall so I really didn’t know what it would look like on camera. So on the day I was choosing shots and totally made the wrong call and Glenn saved my ass by suggesting something else. I think it we had listened to me we wouldn’t be able to cut it all together.
That really rattled me. I suddenly got really worried that the show wasn’t going to cut together and I had a little internal panic attack while still trying to keep things together. There was no time for a break to get my shit together, we had to keep going. And people were still coming up with questions and looking to me as a leader and all I could think about was that I’d gotten in over my head and I shouldn’t be doing this and I just wanted to go home. But that only lasted about an hour and I finally told myself to shut up and get on with it. I also had to realize that I don’t need to have an answer for everything. Filmmaking is collaborative and sometimes it takes another pair of eyes to point out the obvious. That’s why you surround yourself with creative, talented people you trust. After this I really feel like I found my feet as a director and that’s when the shoot got really fun.
The other thing we discovered is just how hot that house can get! With the lights and all the people in that small space it got HOT! We knew it was going to happen but, wow. We opened the windows in between takes but had to close them because of the noise outside and we shot so fast there wasn’t a lot of downtime in between setups. Luckily we had lots of water and none of us are naturally stinky people.
By the end of the day we’d managed to shoot everything we wanted to. Episode 1 was essentially in the can. And I think we even wrapped on time, or maybe it was half an hour late, I actually can’t remember. Regardless I was pretty impressed. But that’s a good thing because it was back tomorrow morning to shoot some promos and get started on episode 2!
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