Shooting Day 1 [09 Jun 2003|01:00pm] SATURDAY, MAY 31. Woke up at 5, 1/2 hour later than Julie and I wanted, but that sure got us motivated to move fast through our wake up routine. Made it to the location by 6, Will and Craig were already there. Helped unload van while Julie quickly set up craft table in stairwell. Leland and Chris started working on setting up lights. Lots of nervous energy in the air. It took 1/2 longer to set up lights than planned, which made me nervous. Actors showed up 1/2 hour late anyway -- Kevin and Ron seemed very confident coming in. Craig and Karin were looking at the schedule, trying to get a sense of how the day would play out. Finally at 8:30 we were ready -- first scene was easy, which is why we scheduled it first -- just Ron and Kevin and three extras, one played by Will. 8:55 we took our first shot. We were done by around 10 -- and suddenly we were back on schedule! The whole day really went by remarkably well -- we had overestimated the time it would take for these scenes -- they were all pretty easy to shoot, even when it involved a dozen or so extras -- once everyone knew what they were supposed to do it pretty much ran like clockwork. Leland was extremely fast with his setups, so we ended up doing multiple setups for some of the scenes as we had originally planned before Thursday's meeting. By 1 PM we had blazed through 3 scenes and were ready for lunch. The rest of the afternoon was spent on two scenes, 5 and 6. These were tougher than the first two scenes, especially scene 6. Scene 6, as we had written it, didn't seem to work much at all -- it was supposed to show increased paranoia spreading among the employees, but it just didn't come off right -- so after one take we scrapped it and totally improvised it. The result was better than what we had before. And with that hurdle jumped, we were wrapped at 6:30PM. Five scenes in 10 shooting hours. Unreal. Too bad the hardest part of the day was yet to come. When I got home I started working with the footage that had been logged while we were shooting, hoping I could finish editing scenes 1 and 2 by the end of the night. Unfortunately what I discovered was that the files had been captured using iMovie, which doesn't run properly on Final Cut Pro. Basically my evening of editing was shot. I didn't sleep well that night, 3 hours and then I woke up frustrated... so I went ahead and re-logged two of the reels myself starting at 3AM in the morning. I had no idea what had happened with the editing, why iMovie had been used. That was going to be the first issue to deal with the next morning... This account of the shoot day feels kind of rushed, but to be honest it really went by in a blur. If more details and moments come later I'll bring them up. post comment

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