DAY 17 – July 26, 2008
Today – a Saturday – was one of the longest shooting days. In hindsight, I find it extremely difficult to believe that we actually shot all this material in one day, but my notes, receipts and old emails indicate that we did.
This shooting day would be spent in Buffalo, and I spent part of the trip there getting some more shots of J.D. driving. Apart from this, our first destination was the Shadow Lounge, where Liz had gotten us permission to film a scene in which Liz's character is performing onstage as a musician.
When I originally wrote the script, I'd envisioned the character of Laurel as more of a tattooed punk chick. With Liz cast in the role, however, it seemed more sensible to make Laurel an indie folk musician, especially since Liz is a poet herself.
Tom's friend John Reinbird played a guitarist in this scene. He and a drummer, played by Ian Belknad, improvised a minimalist riff while Liz ad-libbed some beat poetry as “lyrics”. Impressively, Liz kept this up for ten whole minutes while the camera rolled – obviously, not all of this ended up in the finished scene. (Don't worry, you'll get to see more of it at a later date.)
We had two background extras for this scene, although Wendy and Sean stepped in and thus brought the number up to four. Sadly, you have to look quick to even notice that there were other people in the club at all, so obviously I wasn't positioning people on camera as creatively as I'd done on previous shoots. However, one of the extras seemed to fit another small part that still needed casting later on. (More about him later …)
My memory insists that the Shadow Lounge scene was the only thing we shot that day, and that everything else was on another day altogether. Apparently, my memory is wrong. We got lunch at Super Fuji Buffet again – maybe this was the day I had my nose buried in the schedule instead of socializing.
After this, I checked into a hotel room that I'd booked for filming another scene, and dropped off some excess equipment that wouldn't be needed until then. We then hit the road in J.D.'s van to film the longest and most complex of all the driving scenes, which concludes with a lengthy monologue as J.D.'s character, Josh, explains the story arc of the sci-fi novels that he's so obsessed with.
When I wrote this scene, I'd envisioned it as being sort of like the Indianapolis speech from Jaws. My idea was that Josh would describe these fictitious events with grave importance, as though he himself had experienced them and lived to tell the tale. J.D. had a funnier idea, though, which was to play it as an overly intense fanboy who was determined to finish his anecdote even while realizing that his unwilling audience had no interest.
J.D. also insisted, understandably, that he should pull over before telling the story, since performing this complicated scene while driving would be too difficult. This turned out to be a good idea, as the driving portions of the scene turned out to be a continuity nightmare.
Due to the sheer amount of material we were trying to crank through in a short time and under awkward circumstances, I figured it would be absurd to demand that the actors deliver the lines in this scene exactly as written; the most I could ask was that they hit all the essential beats of the scene in their own words. Nonetheless, I think this was J.D.'s finest hour as an actor. He nailed both the tone and the content of this massive scene, and stuck closest to the script out of anyone.
We then went back to the hotel to film a scene there - actually two scenes, one set in the evening and other taking place the next morning. Since the sun was setting as we shot, we actually filmed the morning scene first, then filmed the evening scene after we lost the light. In a well-meaning attempt to save time and cut costs, I relied on available light to shoot these scenes – fine for the day scene, somewhat less fine for the night scene.
Finally, we shot another driving scene, this one at night, as the characters arrive at the hotel. As originally scripted, this dialogue was originally going to play out in a hotel lobby, with a concierge listing in amusement to the characters arguing, but it was simpler to play the scene in the car instead.
This last scene of the day was one that I have almost no firsthand memory of shooting. Obviously I did shoot it, since the footage is in the movie, but I must have been just dog tired by this point, and I'm sure the actors felt the same way.
Still, we shot an impressive eleven pages of material today – about a tenth of the shooting script – and I must have breathed a lot easier knowing that these scenes were done.
Showing posts with label super fuji buffet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label super fuji buffet. Show all posts
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
25 Months Ago: Day 8
DAY 8 – July 5, 2008
Another Saturday. This shoot involved all the main cast, and took place at a parking lot at University of Buffalo, North Campus.
I had thought of a couple extra lines of dialogue to add to the scene, to earn Karyus' character an extra laugh. During the shoot, Karyus commented that this scene summed up the movie, and maybe he was right.
We filmed the scene in sections – the actors would perform a chunk of lines from the scene, I would get several takes from various angles, and then the actors would perform the next few lines, and so on. When not needed on-camera, Wendy helped out by holding the boom pole while I filmed.
I seem to remember Liz being the one to recommend the particular parking lot we used – or at least, there was some driving around from parking lot to parking lot with her navigating and me weighing her recommendations. Or did that all happen on some previous day, when we were scouting this location in the first place?
Anyway, July 5 was a clear, warm, sunny day. That was the good news. That was also the bad news. The intense heat didn't make anyone very comfortable – as director/cameraman, I could at least hide under a hat and sunglasses, but the actors weren't so lucky, with the partial exception of Liz who got to don a pair of sunglasses during the scene.
Reuben had some forceful dramatic dialogue in this scene, but unfortunately there was relatively little light on his face due to the position of the sun behind the campus buildings. When I looked at Reuben through the viewfinder, I saw a dark silhouette in a blazingly bright environment. I tried using the dashboard shade from my car as a reflector, but that didn't help the lighting much and served only to aggravate Reuben's (literal) allergy to sunlight.
I seemed to have only one of two choices for setting my exposure. I could set it for the environment, and let Reuben remain a silhouette. Or I could set it so that Reuben's face was visible, but make it look like he was standing in heaven, or in the middle of a nuclear explosion. Ultimately I tried to split the difference as much as possible without making the background too bright, while shooting Reuben from a slight angle so that at least his mouth movements were visible.
In the script, the characters separate and go off in different directions to explore the campus, but I skipped most of that material today. I only had Karyus for about 16 days, so he was my priority; pretty much anything that didn't feature him would have to be filmed later.
With the parking lot scene in the can (or rather, on the tape), we then shot some driving scenes. J.D. had generously allowed use of his own van for all of these scenes, which was convenient because he was the one doing all the on-camera driving anyway, and also because a van has more room than a car, making it easier to get camera angles.
Some of these driving scenes were on the UB campus, and some were on the road in Amherst; the latter were supposed to take place in Canada. I had in mind a particular type of house I'd often seen during my own car trips to Toronto, and so I asked Liz to direct us to a neighborhood where we would pass by houses of this type. She misunderstood the type of housing I was looking for, and kept leading us past housing complexes. But as luck would have it, we passed the appropriate type of house anyway, and I managed to get the shots I needed.
Again, getting Karyus' scenes done was a priority, so we recorded all car scenes that had him in them. In order to get various camera angles, we would sometimes return to a designated spot on campus and drop off or pick up a cast member, so that the cameraman (me) could occupy his/her seat to get a different camera angle.
We had lunch at the Super Fuji Buffet in Amherst. I honestly don't remember whether lunch was before or after (or between?) car scenes. I do remember having my nose buried in the schedule, planning the next scenes while the cast socialized.
This was probably my least favorite day of shooting since Day 2 – it was rough on the actors and on myself – and the pain continued when I finally watched the raw footage.
Reuben's close-ups were as problematic as I feared, although I would ultimately be able to correct them in post-production. If we'd shot this at a different time of day, maybe the situation would have been different. So it was a lesson learned about scheduling, and knowing where the sun is going to be when filming outdoors (as well as learning a new Final Cut Pro setting).
Also, a middle section of the big dramatic scene was underexposed to a degree that was not salvageable. The particular camera I was using (Canon HV30) does not have any f-stop settings; it sets brightness automatically when turned on, and the user can raise or lower the brightness from this initial setting. So I was having to adjust the brightness by eye – not an easy thing to do on a blinding July day, and I must have turned off the camera between sections of the script, and gotten a different light reading (or adjusted it differently) when I turned it back on.
Editing this scene would eventually require trimming as many lines from the affected section as possible, and patching over the remaining dialogue with cutaways from other scenes.
The car scenes weren't the best either – whether through my own fatigue, or wariness at pushing the actors too hard after such a hot day, I must have adopted a “just say some lines and I'll use them” attitude, because I'd gotten very few takes of these scenes, none of which were perfect. It would take some clever editing to make these scenes work, and I ended up cutting some of this material altogether.
The raw footage of the campus driving scenes did feature of one of the cast members (I won't say who) looking out the window and saying “Oh my lord. Now that's a behind!” I never saw the coed who inspired this remark, and this generously proportioned stranger was not captured on tape. Oh well.
Another Saturday. This shoot involved all the main cast, and took place at a parking lot at University of Buffalo, North Campus.
I had thought of a couple extra lines of dialogue to add to the scene, to earn Karyus' character an extra laugh. During the shoot, Karyus commented that this scene summed up the movie, and maybe he was right.
We filmed the scene in sections – the actors would perform a chunk of lines from the scene, I would get several takes from various angles, and then the actors would perform the next few lines, and so on. When not needed on-camera, Wendy helped out by holding the boom pole while I filmed.
I seem to remember Liz being the one to recommend the particular parking lot we used – or at least, there was some driving around from parking lot to parking lot with her navigating and me weighing her recommendations. Or did that all happen on some previous day, when we were scouting this location in the first place?
Anyway, July 5 was a clear, warm, sunny day. That was the good news. That was also the bad news. The intense heat didn't make anyone very comfortable – as director/cameraman, I could at least hide under a hat and sunglasses, but the actors weren't so lucky, with the partial exception of Liz who got to don a pair of sunglasses during the scene.
Reuben had some forceful dramatic dialogue in this scene, but unfortunately there was relatively little light on his face due to the position of the sun behind the campus buildings. When I looked at Reuben through the viewfinder, I saw a dark silhouette in a blazingly bright environment. I tried using the dashboard shade from my car as a reflector, but that didn't help the lighting much and served only to aggravate Reuben's (literal) allergy to sunlight.
I seemed to have only one of two choices for setting my exposure. I could set it for the environment, and let Reuben remain a silhouette. Or I could set it so that Reuben's face was visible, but make it look like he was standing in heaven, or in the middle of a nuclear explosion. Ultimately I tried to split the difference as much as possible without making the background too bright, while shooting Reuben from a slight angle so that at least his mouth movements were visible.
In the script, the characters separate and go off in different directions to explore the campus, but I skipped most of that material today. I only had Karyus for about 16 days, so he was my priority; pretty much anything that didn't feature him would have to be filmed later.
With the parking lot scene in the can (or rather, on the tape), we then shot some driving scenes. J.D. had generously allowed use of his own van for all of these scenes, which was convenient because he was the one doing all the on-camera driving anyway, and also because a van has more room than a car, making it easier to get camera angles.
Some of these driving scenes were on the UB campus, and some were on the road in Amherst; the latter were supposed to take place in Canada. I had in mind a particular type of house I'd often seen during my own car trips to Toronto, and so I asked Liz to direct us to a neighborhood where we would pass by houses of this type. She misunderstood the type of housing I was looking for, and kept leading us past housing complexes. But as luck would have it, we passed the appropriate type of house anyway, and I managed to get the shots I needed.
Again, getting Karyus' scenes done was a priority, so we recorded all car scenes that had him in them. In order to get various camera angles, we would sometimes return to a designated spot on campus and drop off or pick up a cast member, so that the cameraman (me) could occupy his/her seat to get a different camera angle.
We had lunch at the Super Fuji Buffet in Amherst. I honestly don't remember whether lunch was before or after (or between?) car scenes. I do remember having my nose buried in the schedule, planning the next scenes while the cast socialized.
This was probably my least favorite day of shooting since Day 2 – it was rough on the actors and on myself – and the pain continued when I finally watched the raw footage.
Reuben's close-ups were as problematic as I feared, although I would ultimately be able to correct them in post-production. If we'd shot this at a different time of day, maybe the situation would have been different. So it was a lesson learned about scheduling, and knowing where the sun is going to be when filming outdoors (as well as learning a new Final Cut Pro setting).
Also, a middle section of the big dramatic scene was underexposed to a degree that was not salvageable. The particular camera I was using (Canon HV30) does not have any f-stop settings; it sets brightness automatically when turned on, and the user can raise or lower the brightness from this initial setting. So I was having to adjust the brightness by eye – not an easy thing to do on a blinding July day, and I must have turned off the camera between sections of the script, and gotten a different light reading (or adjusted it differently) when I turned it back on.
Editing this scene would eventually require trimming as many lines from the affected section as possible, and patching over the remaining dialogue with cutaways from other scenes.
The car scenes weren't the best either – whether through my own fatigue, or wariness at pushing the actors too hard after such a hot day, I must have adopted a “just say some lines and I'll use them” attitude, because I'd gotten very few takes of these scenes, none of which were perfect. It would take some clever editing to make these scenes work, and I ended up cutting some of this material altogether.
The raw footage of the campus driving scenes did feature of one of the cast members (I won't say who) looking out the window and saying “Oh my lord. Now that's a behind!” I never saw the coed who inspired this remark, and this generously proportioned stranger was not captured on tape. Oh well.
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