Shooting Day 3

Production Day 3
Sunday, October 1st.

Ah, today was supposed to be the day we start with Alicia as Alaska. But she had told us a few days earlier that she couldn’t work Sunday because she was in a pageant that wouldn’t let her leave the hotel. Man, was I pissed. I mean it’s not like she had the dates a month in advance. Some how there was a miscommunication and she thought the pageant was the weekend before or something like that. Well, we’ll make due. It just makes shooting for us that much easier because it’s less for us to do. Although it means we had to bring Helen (our waitress) back for another day when she was supposed to be done after one day. It also means we have to secure the dinner location again when we were originally only going to shoot there for one day. Well, all we had scheduled for Sunday was the dinner scenes and the interior of the Rahid’s van for when Colin escapes the dorms. Well, shooting that was really easy. Jamie McKeel’s in the scenes and was a real trooper because she was sick and I begged her to come out and do it seeing as our schedule was so tight. I got to meet her mom. We used Jonathan Baranick’s Van which I had always planned on using because of the kidnapping scenes. The Van stuff went well and was great to start working with the rest of the cast. Up until that point we had mostly only worked with the Tyler, Jeremy, and Daniel characters. But tonight we got to work with the whole cast because everyone eats at the dinner through out some portion of the night. The location was great. The closed at 8pm and we started rolling camera at 9pm. The crew worked great together and we also had a fool cast of extras thanks to a few friends of mine that rounded some people up. From the last two nights of shooting I learned to be a little bit more conservative with my shot list. Each scene had no more than 4 shots and a lot of them were very similar. We did move around a lot though to make the dinner scenes stand out from one another. For example we had the cops at the bar and Will and Rahid at a booth. Helen did a great job and the other actors chemistry was starting to come out. The extras ended up staying till midnight and were sooooo awesome. We ended up feeding them to try and keep them in the seats. Thankfully it worked and none of our dinner scenes look sparse. It’s a packed house all night. There were some conflicts in the crew and some internal politics that I had to deal with but that comes with any game. The best thing to do when people are butting heads is keep the peace. As a producer you have to keep the peace. I’d say that over all Day 3 of production was by far our best day of shooting. My shot list was much more doable, the crew worked great, we had lots of extras, the acting was good,…and WE MADE OUR DAY!!! Yeah! First time in 3 days of shooting we made our day. It was great. Very good. Yippee. I was stoked.