LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WEEK 4: OH DEAR
Weekend four of this shoot and we just had one of those days where our luck ran out. Our main location was a bar and the big idea was that several disparate storylines would come together here, linking characters and creating a more unified piece. Problem number one: time and money are against us. The schedule for the weekend involved 13 scenes, and nearly 80 setups. Well-oiled tv crews can absolutely blitz setups, but they have the bodies and the experience to do that. We don’t. It was always going to be a big ask, but then other problems just exacerbated the problem.
You have to be creative when you have no money so it’s a challenge
Second problem: the location sucked. We have so little money (and I only actually found out how little this week, you’d be shocked) that locations are pretty much out of our control. From the outset I’d been dead set against the bar we eventually did shoot in; it’s small, cramped, it’s not very interesting to look at but it was free. We simply ran out of time to find a better option and we were stuck with it.
You have to be creative when you have no money so it’s a challenge, and a fun one, but I’d pretty much got all my setups nailed in order to maximise what the bar could give us. But wait…. Next problem, one of our lead actresses was caught up in a fire at her apartment and unable to film at all on saturday or sunday. She’s unhurt, but understandably in shock and there’s nothing you can really do in those kind of circumstances. This wouldn’t normally be such a problem, except that we had to shoot all our bar scenes this weekend for cost reasons. Our deal with Panalux expires this weekend so the cost of lights will be greatly increased for reshooting those scenes. Every penny counts. The other problem was that we could no longer show those portions of the bar where her scenes would be shot, confining us to the most narrow angles and awkward blocking, meaning all the shots were total mingers. You know when you’re shooting shit, and we were shooting shit. I hate that.
I’ve shot a ton of music videos with the obligatory busy club scenes and, let me tell you, finding extras is a lot harder than you might think
Next problem: absentees. Everyone’s working unpaid and occasionally crew members have paid work that they have to honour which is completely understandable. However, Matt, our much-needed focus puller/ac suffered a horrid case of tendonitis leaving us short once again on the camera team. Khanseig our trainee camera assistant had to step in once again and as much as I love the guy, it’s not ideal. Our PM/2nd AD was also missing so we were down two crew members, and that really hurts us. I was there on set but man I had such an off day I might as well have not turned up. No sleep, and a mountain of problems meant I was crap. Crap, crap, crap and that just made it even worse.
Next problem: Extras. I’ve shot a ton of music videos with the obligatory busy club scenes and, let me tell you, finding extras is a lot harder than you might think. People will turn up, but only for an hour then they’re gone. We were supposed to be filming in a busy bar, but only two extras turned up. You really notice when it’s dead in a bar and we desperately needed bodies to fill in the spaces. Aaggghhh.
Next big problem: timekeeping. We were forty five minutes late getting to set because of traffic and because the driver turned up late. Again, these things all add up, and very soon we were having to cut scenes. Not good. One of our stars, Claire, is very ill at the moment and we’d got her down to set to film her opening scene, surrounded by people at the bar, drinking the night away. We had to send her home because there weren’t enough people and we were late. That’s not cool.
At the end of the day we had to get people on the last trains home and we raced through the final scenes giving our actors nowhere near enough time to really produce.
Last but not least, casting mistakes. Way back when we cast an actor and felt pretty happy about it. Good actors were pretty thin on the ground but I was pretty happy with the cast. Then we had the read-through and a couple of actors stood out as not actually being quite as good as we might have thought. We recast one of them during the week and one of the guys who came to audition gave us a truly brilliant reading but was too old for the part. However, I really wanted to bring him into the cast but there just wasn’t room. It was nagging and nagging at me all week but I kept schtum. I should have said something. The actor we’d originally cast turned up and immediately proved to be horribly out of his depth. I genuinely think he’ll develop into a good actor but he was really nervous, couldn’t repeat his performances once we’d dialled them in. It was pretty painful as the other two actors in the scene were on top form. I took him outside for a little word to try and give him some room to recentre and give him a bit of a confidence boost but we kept hitting the same problems and the scenes just fell flat on their faces. Again, we were shooting shit and we knew it. At the end of the day we had to get people on the last trains home and we raced through the final scenes giving our actors nowhere near enough time to really produce. Yuri, our new dop was great, but he was left pulling focus on a really tricky shot, guessing his way through the marks.
Horrid day.
Since then, we have decided to bite the bullet, dump all the scenes we shot in the bar, find a new one, recast the problem character and just chalk it up to a bad day. They happen, and it’s how we pick up this coming weekend that will be more important than anything else. Ah well.
