Tuesday, January 18, 2011

shoot 1.17.11

shot yesterday at the blue monkon SE belmont. rehearsed the afternoon before at home w/ both actors, one of whom had just stepped off a plane. the shoot went pretty well i think but some issues popped up. we shot in the downstairs part of the bar which happens to be directly under a bar next door (if you follow that)
and right in the middle of a long two-shot we started to hear pounding and rumbling sounds. turned out to be people drinking early and shooting pool. i had met w/ dp at blue monk previous friday but - since it was night and there people about and a small band onstage - this never occurred to me. i won't say it ruined takes but more than once the sound threw/distracted one of the actors so much so that he lost his lines. the refrigerator kept cycling too. quite loud...

there were two big issues, both of which were solely my responsibility 1) i hadn't fully worked out the visual approach. b/c it's such a talky scene (18 pages of talking!) i didn't want to cover the whole scene in a two-shot and run the actors down, so there were parts i did in two-shot and parts i did in singles. however this kind of disrupted the flow of what's meant to be a continued, real-time conversation. this left me uncertain about the visuals as the camera started rolling and i ended up altering a series of shots on-set, which in turn erased a great technical idea the dp had. 2) had trouble getting the exact pattern/rhythm i wanted in a long speech. the actor was mostly doing everything right, based off what i told and was telling him but it was still not hitting the beats i heard in my head. i think we ran that speech more takes than anything else and I think i finally got it but i should have worked on it longer in the previous day's rehearsal. i should have stayed on it then, not waited until the day of the shoot.

second half of shoot is this coming saturday. walking shots, train shots, and one final scene between husband and wife.

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