Break a Leg

Always, always assume that your intended shooting location is going to be quarantined.

What?

Let's go to Friday.

Friday: The beginning of our weekend shooting. We've spent the entire week playing email tag with our actors, first we cancelled a shoot, then we un-cancelled it, then we lost an actor and then Drew Lanning single-handedly saved us by finding another one.

Friday, we're set to shoot the Channukah conversation. Due to some scheduling gaffes and me completely forgetting to tell Justin that we're shooting, Justin has to have this surprisingly sitcom-ey conversation with his girlfriend.

[Paraphrased by me:]

Him: Hey, I have too --
Her: Hey! Since we never get to see each other, I wanted to surprise you by making you dinner! ...Now, what did you want to tell me?
Him: I have to shoot.

And that's how Justin lost an eye.

...we shot the conversation and, because we need to balance Break a Leg and a social life to stay sane, we went out to a few bars and went to bed at around 2-3 am...

Saturday: ...only to wake up at 9 am, crying a little. Our first shoot was at a post office, the circumstances were hilarious and I really don't want to ruin the joke, so I'm going to have to be vague. We basically had to shoot with a fake dead body in the store -- except the owner didn't actually close the store to shoot, so we'd have to stop periodically while customers bought something. The best moment was when a customer was having something shipped while one of our actors was pretending to be dead right between him and the store owner -- pure genius.

Now we move on to the quarantine.

San Francisco has a small island between Oakland and San Francisco. The Bay Bridge rests atop of it, and then continues on to Oakland, Berkeley and the East Bay. The island is called Treasure Island -- and makes you think of palm trees, white sand and pirates.

What it really looks like is the type of place a zombie infestation would happen.

It's covered with warehouses, low-income housing and a lot of abandoned, creepy buildings. Oh, and geese. There are lots of geese. There's also no gas station or grocery store on the island, so the locals have to drive to San Franciso or Oakland to get gas or food -- what if they run out of gas, you wonder? Well, it's just a cold swim to either city through shark infested waters. Oh, and I think there's some nuclear waste or something on the island. I forget what the details are, but it's ripe for zombie infestation.

Anyway, our second shooting location is scheduled to be on Treasure Island. If you remember the Pilot episode of Break a Leg, the SF montage shows a shot of the entire city with the Bay Bridge spanning to the left side -- that's the gorgeous view that Treasure Island offers. That's where we plan to shoot -- except here's the thing, due to a recent oil spill in the Bay, the entire San Francisco side of the harbor on the island was taped off so that cleaning crews can clean up.

So, our shooting location is quarantined.

This is a prime example of our luck.

Luckily, we drove around the island and managed to shoot on the Oakland side. This killed the view but made the scene make a bit more sense. However, the shooting conditions here were terrible. We had to pause every 5-10 minutes as a plane flew by, or as an armada of sail boats sailed through our shot. We even had to shoot a shot as a mirror image of itself -- in other words, our actress was supposed to be on the left side of the frame, but because the sun was blowing her out, we put her on the right side and had her do everything with her opposite hand -- so that we can flip the scene in post-production (we'll see if this actually works and we'll explain it more thoroughly once you see the footage.)

We finally got done with the shoot and took the rest of the night off as we had another shoot at 10 am on Sunday.

Sunday: We have a new actress! So far, it's a small part, but she has had roles on ER, Gilmore Girls and many more. She came to act with Mr. Drew Lanning and she was fantastic. Our first shoot with her? Inside a bunker where we lit something on fire -- take that, ER!

The shoot went surprisingly smooth. Aside from planes and people flying/talking through our location, it was done fairly quickly. Done, we went back to the Swambler House (where Dashiell, Justin and Daniela live), ate some sushi, laid on the couch and stared at the ceiling blankly for a few minutes, then went to finish up the edits on the Channukah conversation.

I know this isn't a production note, but we did something really interesting that shows the power of editing in this one.

The ending of the conversation wasn't quite working. We had Stan name off a bunch of Yiddish phrases with David getting more and more irritated and then telling him to leave. It wasn't working, so we just went with him climbing back into his ceiling vent, where he says the borscht/mensch lines and then David says, "I have to get a new publicist."

The new publicist line was falling flat and the ending wasn't working. So, going off the idea that it'd be hilarious if Stan fell through the ceiling again, we sifted through the footage to find another take of him breaking the ornament. We found what's now become my favorite line, "Tazel mov, heeey!" and added the sound of Stan not only falling through the ceiling but also of him breaking through glass. Add that take of "Tazel Mov," put a few filters on it to make it seem like it's in another room and voila -- we've got an ending. And a hilarious one at that.

And that was our weekend. Three more scenes left before we're wrapped! Oh, it's coming soon, Swamblers, it's coming soon...

-Yuri