As some of you may know, my production company and I are working on our biggest project yet. A 40-minute movie musical based on the ideas and songs by Jonathan Coulton.
I drove to Pittsburgh last Saturday night to check in with my cast and crew and we sat around making piles of whatever we needed for the next day. A full crate of extension cords, new memory cards for our cameras, every last piece of our costumes and the pre-requisite junk food we'd be chowing down on between takes. After sleeping for a minimal amount of time (see: an hour or two) we loaded up our cars and drove to our location at 4 AM.
Setting up everything you need to film on location can be a pain sometimes, especially because oftentimes you'll need to reset the location back to whatever it looked like beforehand when you're done. By about 6 AM our full cast and crew had arrived and gotten into costumes and we were ready to get our first shot in.
Fast forward to lunch at noon and we had knocked out a good 3 pages of the script and were looking over the dailies. Everything looked fantastic! I was pretty pleased at our progress. For mainly having acted on stage my whole life, repurposing my talent for film was quite the experience but a very fun one at that. One thing I learned was that shooting outside can be a nightmare when you have to contend with hot humid weather and clouds taking away your natural sunlight. Add in the fact that you have to eat multiple PB&J sandwiches so that the editor doesn't have a nightmare cutting scenes together and you've got yourself a fun experience on your hands. Yikes.
The day progressed and spirits remained high throughout. At 10 PM our director "called it" and we began to strike our sets and put everything back in its place. All in all we shot about 8 pages, which isn't bad for 16-hour shoot. We had survived our first day and we have 4 more days on our schedule to finish up. I can't help but feel this is going to turn into something pretty fun when all is said and done and edited. I've included some stills from our dailies so you guys can see everything.
EDIT: Including a link to our first Behind the Scenes video so you guys can see what we worked on before this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5T03H_MCXY
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