07/26: Sometimes things go wrong in production. (Sometimes?)

Two weeks ago we had our "hell week", eight straight days of filming. We started off by shooting the bar scenes in the film, using a bar in old town Fairfax. The next day, we were to meet outside of Fredericksburg to film an outdoor patio scene.

First of all, it took me three hours to make an hour drive because there were accidents along the way. I think of anything we did that week, we all sat in traffic the most. So, I was late to the set; I had a polo with Ron Price's logo embroidered onto it for wardrobe and a badly, hastily made (all on purpose) movie flyer (for the movie being shot within our film) as a prop.

I arrived on the set as they were striking the set (i.e. breaking everything down). The shoot hadn't gone well at all, there was construction across the street that could not be controlled and it had messed up every take. There was also the rumbling of thunder in the background that messed up the sound. We left the location, hot and discouraged, and caravanned in five vehicles to Colonial Beach, Virginia.

The scene being shot here was a kissing scene!

Niel the director is giving the actors smooching tips. *snicker*

These are two of our actors: our supporting character "Alex" and our lead "Shelly", who is played by LA's Taylor Coffman.

We were so ecstatic about the end of the day working out! It was great to salvage a day of filming when we thought earlier all would be lost. It was thundering and lightening severely but the weather held out for us to get this one scene done up. Here is our production assistant Corey, myself, and our assistant director Snuffy in a crab cutout in Colonial Beach.

The next afternoon, we shot a diner scene between Shelly and Alex.

This picture doesn't really show much, I'm sorry, just Corey holding the marker before the monitor to mark the scene and take number. It was at the diner, however, where I learned our assistant director Snuffy and I could not work together as extras. We sat at a table in the background of the bar over mugs of hot coffee and every time we looked at one another, we would explode in laughter! The first few takes, Neil would yell Action and I would look at her, and she would mouth the words, "I love you," and then of course I would laugh. We had to be silent yet look like we were talking. So, in the next few takes, I whispered about plotting her death using nothing but the plastic soup spoon I had in my hand to stir my coffee with. We laughed and laughed. We cannot work together!!

We filmed the diner scene outside of Fredericksburg, VA, and it took longer for the cast and crew to wait around for the place to close than it did for us to get the filming done. It went off without a hitch because the actors were on the ball and everything worked like clockwork.

The next day we met at 8am at my apartment in Sterling. I changed the apartment around so that it would suffice as Alex's apartment for a key scene involving Shelly. In it, she escapes to the bathroom with her bloody nose, establishing she has a serious terminal illness. We had some fun with fake blood in the bathroom.

Afterward, we caravanned once more down to Fredericksburg, and shot a hospital scene that happens in the beginning of the script, where Shelly and her sister April find their mother is in a coma. This was another point where things went awry, at least for the production designer. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of the hospital scene, for I, Alessandra, was cranky with our director and lead actress for undermining my wardrobe preferences. Hey, I didn't spend two months of pre-production desigining this script just to become a glorified make-up artist! Thankfully for the iPod Jesse left me with while he went to Italy that week, I sat offset and tuned everyone out for one of my many infamous Production Designer's Zen Moments.

We ended the week back at the fraternity house in Fairfax, filming scenes for the movie within the film, "Lucifer Cicero".

This, evidently, is the Are We Lost? car scene shot for the fake movie. And below is me, turning our talent Emory into Lucifer Cicero, the title character in the fake film of the same name.

Those red things on his forehead are horns. I wish I had a finished shot of his face, it was pretty rad.

So, that, in a nutshell, was Hell Week. We got an estimated 40% of the script finished. I had two glorious weeks off and now am headed to Virginia, for real. We will be filming every single weekend through the middle of September, three-day weekends for the most part. Stay tuned!!

07/12: Firehouse Grill

This is the biggest week of all. We're shooting every day from the 11th through the 17th. Sunday night we gathered for filmmaking at the Firehouse Grill in Fairfax at 1130pm. We didn't leave until 9am on Monday. I had gone down to Asheville, NC on Friday night, and I drove all day Sunday to get back in time for a production meeting at 4 to meet with the actors and go over wardrobe. I fell asleep on the set at around 8 in the morning.

Sunday night's shoot was a bar scene.

This is Pete fixing the lighting for the scene. There are just three people in the scene, but you can see how many people are on set, standing around just off-camera, in reality. Think about that the next time you see a scene in a movie that seemingly only has one or two people. Just millimeters out of the frame of the scene a sound grip is holding a microphone boom to pick up the actor's voices, for example. Then there is the director, looking at the monitor of the film, and director of photography behind his camera, the production designer, all of the assistants, wardrobe, make-up, a still photographer, the list goes on and on!

The film is set in a small town that has one central bar, and there are a few scenes with different characters that take place there. My friend JP got to come down from Delaware and play one of the bartenders for a few scenes!

I even got to be an extra, at about 5 in the morning, sitting at a table with our still photographer Jason, holding a bottle of beer and looking engrossed in conversation with him and texting on my cell phone as I would in a bar like that. That was probably the most fun that night, everyone being extras to fill up the bar, sitting at different tables. Between takes I would shoot spitballs at the table of interns with a drink straw and we debated who had the coolest table. We  made up stories about the seats left unsat that had a watered-down drink sitting there as a prop regardless. "Shaquina is still in the bathroom! GOSH."

I had to do a lot of make-up for our actors, too, which to tell you the truth is not my favorite thing in the world though I'm alright at it. I had to make two main actors look tired and strung out and make our leading lady look lovely, which was easy because she's very attractive. I made Percy and Ian look sweaty and our Creepy Old Guy look more schmarmy by swabbing KY Warming Lube on their foreheads and his chest, a nice little piece of trivia for you future "11" fans.

On the outside of the bar looking in...

Today I have to go to a plant nursery and pick up Irises for Shelly's scenes. In my research for this film I've found the Iris is the flower marked for death, Iris being the Greek Goddess who was responsible for taking women's souls across the river. Shelly is our main female actor, and she has terminal cancer. In each key scene with her, I will have Irises somewhere in the background.

We have a big shooting schedule for today, we leave Fairfax at noon for Fredricksburg and Colonial Beach for several outdoor shots. Unfortunately, Hurricane Dennis will make it rain up here later this week, so we have to push our external shots up to now. I had to drive up to Newark, DE at midnight to get some shirts I had embroidered with the logo from Price's manure farm, as he is in more scenes, and have to drive back early in the morning to rendesvous with my production crew.

I'll post more soon! 

 

07/06: Old D.E. Randall interviews

We just completed our second weekend of filming.

The first weekend was an exterior shoot, in 102 degree weather, no shade. This past weekend was in interior, but because the AC could be detected on our sound, we had to shut it off, so it was a hot shoot anyhow.

We used our producer's frat house from when he was in college.

The place was a big fat dump. Ants crawled everywhere. The kitchen smelled like steaming piles of dog feces. It was all pretty foul. Nevertheless, I think I just did my best work as a production designer.

The scene we shot was an ongoing interview that narrates the bulk of the script, so overall these scenes would take up about a third of the film. The film is all about parallels, and the interviewee of a documentary set 30 years from now who's spinning a tale about the worst film ever made and how it got made, present day.

The livingroom I created around our character Old D.E. Randall is a fricken visual masterpiece, given what I had to work with. It took me four days to design and two long days and nights and three PA's to set it up.

The set itself I kept three basic colors: white, beige, and black, with lots of exposed wood. Everything that was black was either in pairs or was parallel against a light background to make the contrast strikingly visual. The film is entitled "11" which is a parallel in of itself.

The interviewer, Kendell, sat in a black leather computer chair facing his interview, Old D.E. Randall, in an overstuffed easy chair in beige. I tacked a blanket on the side facing the camera that was light brown with three black stripes on the end, I tacked it so the lines led straight up to Randall. On the wall in the background was a large window I covered with a dingy white blanket and tacked black material I had cut into strips to the blanket, at a diagonal, so in the wide shot the lines in the background and the lines in the foreground (on the easy chair) all lead the eye to Randall.

The only real color was the wardrobe. I dressed Randall in a deep red polo and Kendall in a bright green tee. It was my humble homage to Amelie's production design, as the foreign film is saturated with reds and greens throughout. But everyone on the crew is getting their subtle nods in, our director for instance has a line referencing the Princess Bride, our Producer originally named a character after a part Brandon Lee played in a film, and I forget what our DP's deal is. The pool of red on the right side and the pool of green on the left side against the dim beiges and blacks looked ex-cel-lent.

There's me on the right, making sure the actor's make-up is ok.

In addition to the 45 degree parallels that led to D.E. Randall as the puppet master spinning this tale set in present day, I had straight verticals in pairs to play up the numeral 11. There were two black bookcases on either side of the white window in the background, fillled with every type of book imaginable as D.E. Randall is an extremely well-read old man. There were halogen free-standing lamps in the background, in black of course, against a light beige wall. Randall wore black pants and black boots so even his legs were a 45 degree angle that led up to himself.

Everyone was so happy looking into the monitor as we shot. The wide-angle was just gorgeous.

I got maybe 2 hours of sleep over four days, but to hear my director and DP say, "Alessandra, we're glad to have you on board," at the end of it made it alllll worth it.

Our next scheduled shoot runs from July 11th through the 17th. I have so much prep to get finished!! I really think I have discovered a bonus calling. I mean, I know I was put on this earth to 1. write and 2. to care for poor and underpriveledged children. (I sponsor a child in Ecuador through children.org, donate regularly to UNICEF... and fully plan to adopt someday. I really wish I could do more right now.)

But production design has been incredibly rewarding, in college as an art director for student films I had a lot of fun with it, but now, wow. To analyze the character and read so much into their dialogue and call the shots on what these characters would wear and the things they would put into their livingspaces, to populate their world through design, to add so much more to the words in the script, it's like this incredible Rubix Cube I get to turn over and over and figure out. Theory and fundamentals of color and the elements of design...I feel like a conductor waving all of these things into a visual opus, creating a three dimensional oil painting that wraps around the characters and their words and actions and reveal so much more about them, to add subtle visual foreshadowing, to weave all of these things together to build a rich environment for the plot to unfold and thrive within...it's soooooooooooo fun.

What can I say? I *love* my job!

Now, our actors, that's another story altogether. For one, I abhor SAG actors. They are so...out of touch with the art of filmmaking. They have to be fed filet mignon and they can only work a certain number of hours a day. Whatever happened to the love of art? They have to be flown in and put up in posh places and bark at PA's, "Bottle of water, NOW." I just have less and less respect for "on-screen" talent. I think the real magic happens BEHIND the camera. As in, production design....

Our D.E. Randall was a James Earl Jones type, in his 60s, deep chocolatey voice....had the script for a month and didn't know a single line. I spent three hours in the dog feces smelling kitchen writing up cue cards for him with a Sharpie instead of by the director's side looking into the monitor and making sure everything looked perfect. It really pissed me off. I admit I got pissy about it. I mean, SAG actor. Read your f-ing script.

(Standing right behind our character 'Kendall' in green on the left is a PA holding up large cue cards, just out of the frame. And that is our script supervisor, Sarah, getting as frustrated as the rest of us. ) This just made shooting take twice as long because now we have to hide the cue cards and have PAs hold them so they are at the other actor's eye level so it appears somewhat that he's actually talking to his interviewer. Turning them over creates noise that can be detected on the boom and we have to reshoot and the PA's arms get tired and the words are right there on this cue card that is adding unecessary fill light onto the wrong part of the set so the DP has to adjust the lights and still the actor can't read the cards at a certain distance so modifications must be made to the shot list. GRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

 

He was such a sweetheart, though, that even in the stale hot livingroom he was easy to forgive. Very easy. He was a really great guy.

I sincerely cannot wait until next week. We're doing a lot of bar scenes in southern Virginia so if you want to be an extra, the beer's on us!