TUWOPS: Day One

Just wrapping on our first day. What a ride. Shot seven and a half pages in eight hours. Eight scenes.

What was really fun was shooting the opening scene first thing on the first day. Well, fun in principal. See, we’re shooting this thing documentary style, and on top of that the camera operator is a character in the film so we can’t even do it like The Office where there’s multiple cameras. The majority of the scenes in this film are one long unbroken take. So each scene requires a decent amount of tech to it in terms of camera timing in placing. The best thing we have going for us is that our cast is amazing. They really get the film, and the characters, and so it allows us the freedom to run the scenes as long as we need. That being said, I wasn’t a fan of doing eleven takes on the first shot/scene. The blame lies in outside streetcar noise ruining a few bits here and there.

Despite the near dozen takes on that, and half dozen takes on most other scenes, we kept to schedule and made our day with little effort. And we got almost all of our van scenes done. We gelled the front and side windows with a neutral density filter, which made it look great on camera, but dark to drive in and, I assume, really really illegal. So added to the pressure of getting an awesome scene there was the over-riding chance of getting pulled over by the O.P.P. Shooting in the van also meant that only the actors, myself, our D.O.P./camera op and our sound recordist could be present on the scene. Make-up and wardrobe followed with our second A.D. in another car.

So huge kudos to Alex Poch-Goldin and Kris Holden-Reid for chewing through a serious amount of dialogue and getting some great stuff done. I’m so pumped moving forward on this.