Journal 2

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.