Day 2
I woke up at about 7:45 and headed out to Wal-Mart to get some Duct Tape to mount a few props onto the car's dashboard for the shoot. The day required shots of a stressed Mike going home for the evening...and being oblivious to a rapidly emerging disease. Chris was needed for special effects...which included an hour or so of prosthetic work. After an unexpectedly late night of taking his girlfriend to get the new Harry Potter book, he slept right through his ("Batman Begins" Tumbler-shaped) alarm clock and was woken up by one of my phone calls. It didn't matter much, because Veres was running a little late as well...but luckily everyone got it together by about 10. He created a puss-emerging (notice I avoided using the adjective "pussy") , crimson boil which came out very close to how I envisioned it. Chris also brought a simple, but effective apparatus consisting of an empty, College-issued mini Axe bottle and short tubing to pump up the boil. It worked well minus a few snags in the tubing. Chris thought it out as a heart pumping out of the skin, and it looked very close to just that. I shot a behind-the-scenes interview with Chris as he enjoyed his morning cigarette on my side porch.
We got going about 45 minutes behind schedule, which was scary because three out of the four of us needed to be done by 1. By a little after 11, we were ready to go. We marked out a route of where Mike would be driving and got things rolling. AJ was in the passenger seat getting the bulk of the footage and Chris and I were in the back -- Chris to operate his apparatus and me to get some additional footage. Being that I had never taken the camera into my new car, I didn't realize that it was capable of allowing a shot I envisioned for "Pagan Rd." three summers back but couldn't get due to the space restrictions of a Chevy Malibu (I can't wait to finally put this shot into a movie!). AJ and I decided to have Mike drive downtown as to avoid background trees. For theme reasons, we didn't want much nature in our shots, but we quickly remembered that it's Erie Pennsylvania and there are trees everywhere you look. We actually ended up shooting on the same expressway that we used in the "Waiting" music video we shot over Christmas...which looked much better this time around because it was lit by the afternoon sun in clear skies.
We came back, watched the dailies and were very pleased with how everything looked. A couple of the shots looked very nice in some settings Matt found that make things look film-ishly textured.
Well, about half of the movie is done. Only one day is left...and it's gonna be the big one.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
"Human Carcinogen" journal one
7/14/07
I guess the start to any good movie journal is the description of what went wrong…
Today I scheduled to shoot the first sequence of the script, which consisted of about 8 to 10 shots of Mike’s character Tom ending a long day of work at a construction site. Sound easy enough? The first thing we forgot was a powder to cover Mike’s arm with (it is very significant to the second half of the movie). Hannah went out of her way to buy some baking flour which she quickly drove over. Then Matt realized Mike looked too clean to have just finished a day at a construction site, so the most logical thing was for Mike (along with Adam and Chris, who were standing in as extras) to roll around in some dirt!
Anyways, AJ and I set up a track of plastic tables to dolly a wheelchair on and it ended up being rickety. We decided it was too much of a bother to try to work with, so we used Matt’s monopod as a steadicam and got some decent shots that way.
Then came the bugs and the dust storms. Shortly after Chase arrived, we started getting attacked by gross, green-shelled beetles. Then a large cloud of dirt, blowing from the big mounds dug up by the construction workers, completely engulfed the entire site. Chase put two and two together and screamed, “What is this, The Mummy!!??”
I wish there was some kind of a big conclusion to this story, but the rest of the day went by very well. The footage looks awesome and I’m really excited to keep shooting.
Thanks everyone for helping out!
Nick
I guess the start to any good movie journal is the description of what went wrong…
Today I scheduled to shoot the first sequence of the script, which consisted of about 8 to 10 shots of Mike’s character Tom ending a long day of work at a construction site. Sound easy enough? The first thing we forgot was a powder to cover Mike’s arm with (it is very significant to the second half of the movie). Hannah went out of her way to buy some baking flour which she quickly drove over. Then Matt realized Mike looked too clean to have just finished a day at a construction site, so the most logical thing was for Mike (along with Adam and Chris, who were standing in as extras) to roll around in some dirt!
Anyways, AJ and I set up a track of plastic tables to dolly a wheelchair on and it ended up being rickety. We decided it was too much of a bother to try to work with, so we used Matt’s monopod as a steadicam and got some decent shots that way.
Then came the bugs and the dust storms. Shortly after Chase arrived, we started getting attacked by gross, green-shelled beetles. Then a large cloud of dirt, blowing from the big mounds dug up by the construction workers, completely engulfed the entire site. Chase put two and two together and screamed, “What is this, The Mummy!!??”
I wish there was some kind of a big conclusion to this story, but the rest of the day went by very well. The footage looks awesome and I’m really excited to keep shooting.
Thanks everyone for helping out!
Nick
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