This time last week my mind was littered with doubts, worries, complications, and to-do lists. Today, my mind is blissfully silent. Sure there's two more shooting days this weekend and two the following weekend, but that can wait until tomorrow. I'm too busy basking in the glories of what we accomplished. Not that the weekend didn't have it's ups and downs. In this business you just have to take the small minefields you encounter in stride and keep moving on.
For example, Friday night was our last production meeting before we started shooting. We had the 3 producers, the production manager, one of our PAs and our DP all together for a meet and greet, camera test and to iron out last minute details. And it's a darn good thing we did. When you purchase a great deal of equipment from different vendors over the internet things are bound to either be late, be damaged, be incorrect or some combination thereof. It's a crap shoot, but in ultra low budget film-making you do what has to be done and sometimes that means buying a used shoulder mount from India.
Luckily, our only problem turned out to be a pretty simple, yet heart attack inducing mix up. We had our beautiful Canon 7D DSLR camera and all the accessories and we were about to film something to test it all out, when low-and-behold, we had the wrong cards. For those of you who don't know, numerous consumer-grade camera use the simple, small SD cards. Well, this camera, does not. We needed CF cards. Big ones, like 32gbs. It was 8:15pm on a Friday night when most stores close at 9pm and we were scheduled to be on set at 8am the next day, before stores opened again. So off I went to Staples where I encountered a very un-knowledgeable sales associate, who kept trying to sell me SD cards and couldn't understand my frustration at them only have a single 8gb CF card and his insistence that I allow him to call their store nearby to find out if they had more.
Thanks but no thanks, I now only have 33 mins before BestBuy closes and a 14 minute drive to get there. In the end, I managed to get the cards and a card-reader to boot, but I may have lost a bout a year off my life in the interim. Curse you film ninjas.
I deliberately scheduled the first day of shooting to be light on pages and on persons. I'm all for jumping into the deep end (Sorry, pool humor. Can't help it), but when you're working with a brand new cast and crew you need time to find a rhythm and feel out where your strengths and weaknesses are. It always takes longer than you expect even with the best planning.
So there were only 8 of us. 4 cast and 4 crew. And we only had 4 scenes, totaling 7 2/8 pages and none of them actually required us getting into the pool. Based on the fact that there's no G&E (grip and electric for those of you non-film folk. These are the guys that do all the lighting and rigging. But since we're periodically soaking wet, we decided against lights), I figured it was doable. Turns out it was more than doable. We took our time, had an extra half hour break in the middle of the day and wrapped 45 minutes early. It was fantastic and I slept like a rock.
Yesterday, was a whole other animal. 20 cast members, including children and background. Some union, some not, which complicates matters. Most of which needed to be shuttled to and from the train station to location at various hours. 12 1/8 pages, including the entire pilot episode. And 2 stunts which required people in and out of the water. And we only added a single crew member in order to deal with the mayhem. I say mayhem because at one point I had to crawl under a table to chase after a child and negotiated with another child, promising to let them push me in the pool, clothes and all, if they were quiet and patient. Yup, just a day in the life.
It was controlled chaos. And I LOVED IT! Everyone was doing a multitude of different things. We even had a background actor offer to work as a PA. At any given moment I was 1st AD, production coordinator, actress, child catcher, poop wrangler, continuity, set dec, producer, driver... I have never felt so thoroughly and completely exhausted in the best kind of way. Not gonna lie, waking up for my day job at 5:45am and knowing I had to work two jobs and wouldn't be home again until 9pm tonight was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but it was worth it. I've got to bank roll my dreams, even if it means my entire pay check for today is going directly toward parking and transportation from the past weekend.
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