Shooting Day 4

Production Day 4
Monday, Oct 2nd

The Police Car

The fourth day of shooting was our first day with our police car. One of the things we needed to get to use it on campus was a mall pass; at least this is what the police told me. Usually a mall pass was for parking on the mall. We wanted to just drive down the mall. But whatever. So Danielle and I looked into getting a mall pass and it turned out that only departments could request them. So we had Miguel request a mall pass for a project his students were doing and we got a mall pass. We were pretty worried about it but it turned out to be an easy thing. We picked up the pass on Monday, the day we were going to use it. This was also our first day shooting at the Frat house, which was a friend of mines house. We were starting what tonight what would end up a trend through out production: only shooting half a scene in one night and shooting the rest later. We were only going to shoot with the police car. If the car wasn’t necessary in the shot, I wasn’t going to shoot it. So like the scene when the guys at the frat house are rescued by the cops, we were going to shoot the first half of that on a later night and do the second half on day 4 with our police car. That way we utilize the police car as it was expensive (in our terms) to rent. Well, because it was a police car and because we were going to use it and the emergency lights in a residential area I decided to let the local police as well as the campus police know where we were and what we were doing. Dan showed up to load the stuff and Danielle and I went to the two stations. 5 o’clock traffic was terrible and when I got the local police station…there was a LINE! Literally I was fourth in line to just turn in a letter letting the police know where I was and what I was doing. I’ve never seen a line in the front lobby of a police station, but I was fourth! Grrr. Anyway, I ended up being 30min late to the shoot. I had made a big mistake in calling crew and cast at the same time and so when I got there half the cast was already there just hanging around. Thankfully Tyler was a good host. So we started shooting and the footage was good but it was taking for ever. We ended up moving to campus very late and poor Danielle was going insane because all the cast and crew kept getting parking tickets. Also, it didn’t make sense to set up at the MU when we were just going to move to the other side of campus so we had to call the rest of the cast coming at later call times to meet us where we were. Yeah, they couldn’t find it. Then Danielle had to go get some food for everyone. She had a hard day this day. We set up on one of the side walks and it took like 40min to set up a shot. Poor Akshay was going insane trying to get people to go faster. Kenny had his 2nd assistant on tonight, Joe something. He was really good. But for some reason he never helped us again after that night. I think Dan might have yelled at him and he got pissed or something. Not sure what happened. Anyway. We took a break and ate some KFC. It was probably one of our better catered nights. Mostly through out the shoot we just had dominos. So we had also scheduled this day according to Colin’s schedule. Most of the cast and crew don’t know this but the initial schedule was done to get Colin in the movie. It’s big part and so we did as many of his scenes as we could every night for the first 2 weeks of shooting because that was the only time he was going to be in the valley. We didn’t get to our next location till probably midnight. The last thing we had schedule for that night was the scene with the sorority sisters in the parking garage. This was our first night with Kristin Kelley. It would be our second night with Ali. Well, Jamie McKeel is in the scene and she got into a car accident (small fender-bender) on her way over and couldn’t leave the site of the accident and ended up not coming out at all. And Ali got really sick and had to go to the hospital earlier that night so she couldn’t shoot either. Well we got what we could with the other 2 girls and officer price and called it a night. Noel was nice enough to let us use her car for Alaska’s. I had also hauled David, Colin, and Jon (for his Van) out for shooting that night but couldn’t because of what happened to the girls. Oh well. Guess we’ll have to do the scene before Colin leaves on a different night and bring the cop car back again for another day. Maybe we could cram it into the second day of shooting with the vehicle. Over all I was very happy with the footage but it was hard day schedule wise. Danielle had a hard day too. We only shot about %50 of what I wanted to get done. It was looking more and more like the schedule was going to change from 16 days to longer. Especially with those extra tunnels scenes hanging over our heads. Well, Tuesday was our first day off and I spent the entire day in the computer lab and extended the shoot from 16-20 days. I spent all day on the phone calling actors, crew, and locations to make sure we could make it work. I gave an extra day in the dorms and broke the hardest days in two. I did this mainly because we couldn’t shoot more than 5 pages a day, which is what we’d shot for the first 4 days. But we did have 20 pages in the can. Which is a great feeling.