Driving TMC

I'm sitting in my car on set right now as we are shooting the car/ driving scenes. There's not much for me to do since there is limited room in the car. These are pretty exciting scenes because we are using another one of our (very) expensive toys - a car mount. It straps onto the hood of the car, sprawled out like a spider. To be honest, I'm happier not watching; having our only camera sitting in top of a moving vehicle makes me nervous!

Here's what the mount looks like:
Wish us luck,
B.

Progress Report

We have completed:

-14 days (out of 33) of shooting

-32 3/8 pages (out of 103) of the script

-76 scenes (out of 158)

We are 1/3 (33%) complete!

Efficient Weekend

Last week, Zach (cinematographer), Cody (director) and I finally had our first weekly meeting.  We planned out how long each scenes was going to take so that I was able to do a better job at keeping the production on schedule this weekend.  I think it really helped having this planned, because days 12-14 were our most efficient weekends so far.  Friday and Saturday we finished close to the schedule.  Sunday was a completely different story because we ended with the intimate scenes between the two main characters.  Those were tough - they had to be perfect because they are so important, so I tried to back off a little bit on rushing things.  It's important as a 1st AD to know when to push things along and when to let everyone take their time.

Overall, a good weekend.  We are really getting somewhere!

This week, I will be rearranging the schedule to make up for our disaster weekend. It will take a big chunk of time out of my week, but it's entirely necessary.

Also, this weekend we are shooting in a convenience store, which is kind of cool.

Title Change

I've decided to change the title of my blog from "Quiet on the Set Please" to "Background Action" because it is a better description of what I do on The Mercury Cycle.  Besides it being a call that I say sometimes on set, it describes how most of what I do is in the background.  You don't always see it, but it's there, lingering behind.

Cheers,

B.

Setbacks and Steps Forward

This past week was, to put it delicately, a huge mess. We were extremely underprepared for the weekend of shooting and we saw the results of that lack of preparation very quickly. We were scheduled to shoot the scenes at the cult meeting house. First, we had problems getting the location. Then, the costumes for the cult members weren't ready. Two patterns, one new sewing machine, and several agonizing hours later, we had one solitary robe that was just enough to get through a section of the scheduled scenes.

Luckily we were able to do exterior scenes, which is good because once the trees start to look springy we will begin to have continuity problems with outside scenes.

That said, we are now about 2 days behind schedule. We did use those two days to hold a very productive open forum style crew meeting and to pick up scenes dropped previously. The meeting was effective I think because it allowed us to regroup, figure out where we went wrong and work on fixing the problems. A lot of the things we haven't been doing individually or as a crew have built up until we finally crashed last week. But that's what this whole experience is about - learning what works and what doesn't.

Progress Update

So far, we have completed 11 days (out of 33) of shooting, bagged 22 7/8 pages (out of 103) of the script or 56 scenes (out of 158).  We're about 1/5 of the way there!

Crew Meeting

The crew meeting last night went really well, I think.  It's extremely important for everyone to be open and communicative, especially since we are under such a strict time constraint; We don't have a whole lot of room for any big setbacks.  Having everyone together to talk was good because the producers, Zach and I were able to express our concerns about how things were going, and the rest of the crew was able to respond to those and also to talk about their own concerns.  Being on the same page is key.  We are certainly growing as a team.

Right now we're getting ready to head out to New York for our last 3 days there.  It will be our most strenuous weekend shoot, and I'm sure everyone will feel relieved after it's wrapped.  I know I will.  

Here we go!

Source

Days 4-5

What an intense weekend!  We shot about 15 hours yesterday and another 7 today.  We've bagged about 15 script pages (out of 103) so far.

By my extremely rough calculations, we will have shot between 1/5 and 1/4 of the script after our trip to New York (for the main character's, David, house) this next coming weekend.  Can you believe it?

I'm pretty anxious to have a crew meeting this week.  Besides preparations for the NY shoot, we have a lot to talk about.  

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