Break a Leg

**NOTE: The chat is back in the Boards section. Still fiddling with it, but feel free to play.

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I haven't done this before, so I figured I'd give it a try.

Last weekend was a fairly busy one in regards to shooting, we had to do a lot in a very short amount of time while everything went wrong. I'll try and tell you about it without revealing too much of the next episode.

Friday: Woke up. Oh yes, we woke up. Everyone had to take work off on Friday, by everyone I mean: Daniel (Claudio/Humphrey), Drew (Goat Legs), Flynn (Larry), Dashiell (oh, you know who he is), Justin (you know who he is too) and Nick (Tech 1).

The plans were these: we needed to shoot 6 scenes in 3 locations that were spread out all over the city. Drew had to leave by 4.

You know what? Let's rewind.

Thursday: As we're planning for the shoot, I get a call, first in the day of Thursday from a character I can't reveal. He was supposed to shoot friday as well -- he can't make it. Dammit, we have to reorganize the scenes, but it's okay -- we have a lot to shoot, one scene lost doesn't hurt us too much. Then Flynn calls and says he can't make it until 1 pm on Friday, giving us 3 hours to shoot 5 scenes -- this, by the way, is really, really hard.

Back to...

Friday: Since Daniel's up for it, we decide we'll shoot a conversation with him at 9:30 am and then go to the main shoot at 1 pm. We shoot LoobTube and, by 12:30, rush over to meet Drew at the alloted shooting location.

We sit at a cafe and wait for an hour for everyone to show up. This is both irritating and nice as we hardly ever get to bond with our actors. Usually, the bonding is, "No, that was a bad take." Or, "Okay, let's try this again, only do it well." Or, "No, Chad, Jennifer can't have a sword." So, it's nice to just sit at a cafe for an hour and chat.

But we're wasting precious time. So we decide to start shooting a car scene that Flynn is in (he's the only one who hasn't shown up yet) by shooting all the angles that he's not in. If you're new to filmmaking, that's how it works. First you film Person A, then you film Person B, then, ideally, you shoot some kind of wideshot of both. Sometimes you do over-the-shoulder shots (you see Person A from behind Person B) -- but in a car situation, it's not really possible.

So, they drive off and film everyone and get back just as Flynn arrives. He's grumpy but loveable -- which is Flynn's usual state of mind. We shoot his part of the car scene then rush to the next location -- a little post office that's letting us shoot inside.

Except we can't shoot there anymore, because it's their busy time and we need to do something hilariously awful in there. Damn. Now we lost two scenes.

We rush over to the last location and here we finally get lucky. The weather is perfect (misty, creepy fog) we shoot in a fantastic location and the scenes are short, fun and turn out really well. We get Drew out of there a bit after 4 (sorry, Drew!) and happily go relax.

Sunday: Sunday is a hard day. We have to build a set (I won't tell you what), work with two new actors (I won't tell you why) and do all this in 4-5 hours.

Sunday, 3 am. We get home after hanging out with a good friend of ours, Michael Goode (Pogo #2) who is a fantastic filmmaker as well (helps us on shoots quite a bit). He's leaving to backpack through South America for quite a bit, so we spend a good amount of time relaxing, hanging out and laughing about horrible things.

At 3 AM we get back to Justin/Dashiell/Daniela's place (oh yes, they all live together), Justin looks at the footage from the Conversation and says -- we have to reshoot all of Yuri's angle.

Why, you ask? Because our lens was dirty. You can't see it on Daniel's angle, but when it's on me (David), the sun was hitting the lens hard and making it look like I was trapped in the middle of a dust storm.

Dashiell and I are tired and refuse to shoot. Justin hits us where it hurts, "Oh, did we stop caring about quality?" ...so we give in.

We wake up at 10 am, rush to the Bridge (which is luckily nearby), and film my angle while a friend of ours reads Daniel's side of it (Tacho, from the Halloween minisode).

Then we rush madly to Home Depot, which is a good 20-30 minutes away, buy wood and glue, drive back to the shooting location and build a set in -- I'm not kidding -- an hour. Our two actors arrive and both do a great job.

We somehow finish at a decent hour and go get some dinner and play a game of pool to unwind -- thinking that editing the conversation really shouldn't take so long.

But, we were forgetting what quality Nazi's we are.

We got back at around 12. We got back at 12 and, because we wanted to make it as good as possible, stayed up until 4:30 am to finish up.

And then slept. Glorious, glorious sleep. But not a lot -- because Justin and Dashiell had to get up at 8 am to go to work (I work at home, ha ha!)

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That's our schedule. A desperate attempt to balance some kind of social life so we could survive while shooting and editing wildly. It's hard, it's tiring and it's often frustrating -- but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Well, I would. With, you know, money.

If you guys like this blog, let me know -- I'll do more of these as we shoot.

-Yuri