I haven't written much about it for a while now because the details haven't been terribly interesting. Casting has been a giant pain in the ass. Mostly because there wasn't much to report. I've slowly talked people into being in the movie but without a firm start date not much could be done beyond that. I eventually settled on a young woman to play the lead role and then there was an extended period of nailing down a time to start shooting her scenes. I could have written regular updates on all of this but it would have been amazingly dull.
That all changed today. I had all the equipment I wanted (well, wanted and could reasonably afford). I had my star scheduled. Only a freak disaster could stop me this time. And amazingly, no freak occurrences cropped up. So we all arrived at the store on time and I immediately had a complete loss of what to do with myself. Kristen, the lead in the film, and my wife were standing there staring as I wandered in sixteen different directions at once, trying to figure out what to do with myself.
Eventually I got over that and settled on the first scene to shoot. That meant prepping the area and lighting it. This was the scene in the movie that would require the most lighting, because it occurs in the attic of the store, where the lighting is shit, to put it generously. I replaced the single overhead bulb with a 250 watt photoflood practical bulb I ordered from a film supply company. I then added a second bulb, a more normal 150 watt floodlight in a metal dome pointed at a strategic point. It took a bit of arranging to get the light where I wanted and also keep it out of the shot.
Then it was finally time to go. I called up Kristen, explained what was going on in the scene and then got her in position. It was simple scene, probably less than 30 seconds long but it was one of the few I could shoot very quickly and easily so it was a nice starting point. It went pretty well, doing two takes of each of the angles, more for caution than anything else. Kristen was great, adding a few personal touches I hadn't thought of to the scene.
Then it was back downstairs for the more challenging stuff. As I said, casting was a pain. I wanted several people beyond Kristen to show up tonight and I got exactly none of them. So I compensated by breaking up scenes to only show her side of things. When I get other actors I'll shoot the reverse angles. With proper editing it should be hard to tell they weren't actually there at the same time. It all went pretty well. When I first started to light the register scenes, I had some difficulty with customers walking up to Kristen's register to pay for things. This despite having a second clerk and register not surrounded by a camera and lights. One fellow actually stood behind me for a minute, thinking he was on line. He claimed to be really tired and would have to be to not have noticed that something might be a little odd about the situation. It's stuff like this that gave me a lot of the material for this film.
So that's about it for now. More shooting is scheduled for next week with Kristen. Hopefully I'll be able to wrangle other people to do some bits before that. I had originally hoped to have this completed by October but I'm starting to have my doubts about it now. Whatever. The main thing was to learn by doing and that has definitely been happening. Once I got past my initial confusion the creative flow really kicked in and I started having a blast with it. I could definitely enjoy doing a lot more of this.
So until I do some more shooting I'll be going over the first batch of footage. Not much of it will cut together coherently at this point but I'll tinker with it anyway. Just for fun.
- This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it is probably to wound up to sleep tonight.
