06/27: Ron Price's Farm

Yesterday was our first official day of shooting. We did the scene that involves a manure farm. It's not a real manure farm, just a regular animal farm scouted in Virginia with rolling hills...and lots of llamas. Oh yes, every ten minutes, a Napolean Dynamite quote. "TINA come get your DINNER."

The sun was blazing and we were like limp lettuce in the heat, which hovered around 100 degrees F. I got sunburned pretty bad despite ample lotion application. It was a challenge keeping our actors looking fresh, too. We had to shut down completely for a couple of hours early afternoon because the sun's glare was much too harsh.

My day began at 500 in the morning. I didnt get to sleep before midnight the night before because I had to get some props from my embroidery lady in Delaware before going to Virginia and picking up another prop from my assistant's house. Jesse and I crashed in Sterling at the apartment I'm moving into later this week for the summer.

The alarm went off all too early, first at 430, then I slept in for a half. Got out the door just after 530 to be at my producer's house in Fairfax by 615. Met the director of photography, the producer, and our slew of interns there, and later our script supervisor and actors. Our director met us on location, after we caravanned down to Fredricksburg.

First, one of my production assistants, Evelynne, and I tried to work a power saw to cut the posts of our RLP Fertilizer, Inc. sign diagonally so that we could stake it into the ground. Yeah, so we weren't so good with a saw and Jesse had to come over and save the day.

Then we took the sign down the gravel road and hammered it into the ground, after a few more modifications. Pete set up a camera with his assistant Kristen down there and then set up the Canon XL2 (drool) up by the farm.

this is our producer, Dave, and our director of photography, Pete (bad pic of him, oopsie). You can see Jesse there too, hardworking as part of the crew.

The crew wrestled with the silk and the rest of us wrestled with the sweat on our actors' brows. We broke for lunch and sat on hay bales in the barn.

A failed mission to aquire a Mercedes from a local dealership that wasn't open on Sundays forced us to improvise. Eh, a sleek black Saturn SUV didn't look bad after I hand washed and buffed it, lucky for Niel, our director.

This is one of our interns, Corey, hanging onto the silk used to diffuse the sun.

I drove the SUV and hit my mark several times but the funniest was when the farm dog, Gus, wandered in front of the car as I was pulling up, sat down, and started to lick his uh-oh, on camera. Man, we all fell apart on that one.

The heat made us loopy but overall we worked very hard on every take to make them the best they could be. We finally struck the set at about 700pm.

Thank GOD our next shoot is an interior. Yesterday was pretty brutal. I have so much to get ready for the next shoot. I have to get on my assistants to help me find just the right furnishings. This is one of the more important scenes in the script as it takes up about a third of the film, broken up. It's the narrator's scene. It's also the most challenging for me since it is set 30 years into the future. This poses a wardrobe concern, amongst others. Thursday night I go down to Fairfax to dress the set and Friday I help the DP light it.

This is the logo I did for one of our characters, Ron Price. He's a manure salesman.

These were the two actors for the scene, "Ron Price" and "Young D.E. Randall". Price is wearing my logo hat.

I'm so incredibly excited about this project. The script is brilliant and riveting and our crew is dedicated. This is going to be the best summer of my entire life.

filmmaking

We had a meeting Sunday where I finally got to put actual real live faces to the characters' names in the script I've been living with for the past three months. Our producer made the exciting announcement that we're not stopping at the film festival circuit, but gunning for distribution. And with Entertainment Weekly's recent article on Manos: Hands of Fate, we've already gotten some free publicity.

I've been hard at work on my production illustrations. I met with my DP on Saturday to flesh out things like lighting and scene comps. We're shooting our B roll and establishing shots June 25th and then we plunge right in to our first chunk of filming. I'm so excited about this project, and I have every confidence it's going to go far. I've read crappy scripts before, and this ain't one of 'em.

I got to pick out my production assistant from a batch of student interns at George Mason University. I'm ecstatic to have my very own PA, but now I have to worry about giving her enough to do, I'm so used to doing everything on my own. Luckily, I have a property list so long it could black out the sun, so I think I will get her to focus on that while I get my PD notes together.

Our own producer has a meeting with Mark Gordon, II, (doesn't that make him a Jr.?) who produced Saving Private Ryan, Swing Kids, The Day After Tomorrow, The Patriot, Broken Arrow, Speed...to name a few, this week, to pick his brain and otherwise pitch the script. If I could be a fly on the wall at that meeting...!

This is just an absolutely phenomenal opportunity to have just fall into my lap like this, being asked to production design such a brilliant and dynamic independant script. The film itself is about parallels, and even more bizarre coincidences have been the case in my own life, congruent to the psychology of the film. For instance....last year I began research down in Savannah GA for a historic-fiction novel I wanted to write. The predominant imagery in the novel was the numeral 11, which is a predominant numeral in my own life. When I was first approached to read a script entitled, "11", at initially I sighed, Great.

Would it become a conflict of interest to design the production for a film entitled "11" when my own plot was saturated with the visual elements of the cardinal number? Would I end up stealing from myself to enhance this film?I told my friend Eric that I had begun working on a film called "11" and he laughed, "Boy, they have no idea, but they just hired the expert on 11!"

After reading the script, I was assured that my novel would make it out there someday unscathed. This film is based on IMDb's worst rated film of all time and the strange things that happened to the cast and crew afterward. It's a documentary of the worst film ever made and how it was made that narrates an even deeper set of plots. It's a film within a documentary within a film.......ayeee my brain is leaking out of my ear.....

Well, suffice to say, my novel about Cold War Germany is safe in my notebooks. Long enough journal entry? I'm just one excited little girlie, on the uphill battle to making her dreams come true!