Putting a Scene Together - Part 2

On my way towards set, I felt a mixture of nervousness and excitement. All of the work and effort had led up to this moment. When I arrived on set, everything would be up to me. Luckily, having to pick up our audio guy provided a good distraction.

When I arrived, the crew had already begun to set up. The caterers were just finishing up, and everyone was beginning to work. When our actors arrived, we performed a small rehearsal. There is still no greater excitement then seeing lines you've read and imagined performed by actors. It's something magical that can only be experienced. After our rehearsal, everyone cleared out of the main area to let our gaffer and his crew go to work.

We waited for 3 hours until the initial setup was finished, and I learned a valuable lesson: every set needs one good grip. We had two grips that were not as experienced as I had hoped, and it made our initial set up much slower. I tried to keep the actors loose, go over lines. But all the while, all I could think about was how much time was left and whether I would be able to get everything. We had less than 7 hours, and I had about 15 pages to get through.

After our delay was over, we were finally able to start shooting. We spent the first hour and a half doing our master shot which I only planned to use part of. But with all the blocking, it ended up saving us time further down the line. The longer we worked, the more on schedule we became. Our DP, Martin Moody, worked like a machine with his crew and we were able to quickly change setups with minimal downtime.

We ended up finishing around 6am. We took everything out of the restaurant, and loaded it into our truck. I thanked my cast and crew for an amazing day, and drove back to North Hollywood. I collapsed on the bed and quickly fell asleep. I couldn't wait until I could wake up and get back to set the next day.

Putting a Scene Together - Part 1

It's been a long while since I've written on my long neglected blog. But things have been busy...very busy.  We found a restaurant willing to let us shoot. A small Mexican restaurant in East LA. They agreed to let us shoot for two nights, and make us food. With a location locked, and a crew set everything began to set in motion.

My first choice of cameras to shoot on was an Arri Alexa. But it ended up being out of my price range even with a very generous discount. I had resigned to shooting on a Red Scarlet with cheap lenses. But then arrived a great coincidence. A company I had previously freelanced for just got in their first Sony F55. A 4K camera that, after an in-depth test shoot, impressed both my DP and I greatly. It's ability to handle low-light, and ability to color was absolutely amazing.  I was offered an incredible discount, and our DP happened to get his hands on a set of Cooke S4 lenses. Everything was truly falling into place.

Everything was set. This scene was finally about to happen. Months of hard work, scrounging and scraping for cash, was finally about to pay off. Check back later for part 2, our first day of production.