The actual GOH diary, Day 3

Day 3 (11/9/2010): Will this Agony never end?

These are frame captures from the wide shots of night 3

Featuring  Leanna Chamish, Kimberly Kerr, Rodger Schultz, Robert Haag, Mitch Klein and Richard Cutting.  

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Okay, how do I say this? We fell behind again.


I’m not sure how it fuckin’ gets out of hand. Really, I don’t. We were set to shoot 4 scenes in the foyer. Sure, there’s a little complicated stuff but it’s less than three fuckin’ pages. Somehow it takes us like six hours to do that...


One hot, big busted extra showed up and lightened the spirits momentarily.


The fuckin’ Red doesn’t help. It keeps resetting itself. It’s bulky and heavy.


We move up to shoot the wine room and we’re already way behind. Fall more behind. I try to streamline, but it’s ugly and I’m guessing on shots(revising the shooting script while people are asking me questions, telling me how much time we have—this is not fun filmmaking), so I bet I missed some. I gotta hope I can digitally push in on some shots(I’ve been told you can do it on the Red quite easily, but we’ll see).


We got one shot I liked. Rest is pretty much dogshit, but we had some really nice looking extras/cast tonight. No nudity yet though.


To top it off we got out a little late, and the Cloisters staffers are starting to get annoyed(rightfully so)—and then I get out and one of the extras, a college buddy of mine, has a dead truck. We spend a half hour(at 6am) trying to make it go. No dice.


It almost comes to me driving them the 45 minutes home—luckily we get Noah to do it. I tell him to come in late the next day so he can get some sleep.


I got enough shit to do. I have to stop this derailing train, and fast...I think we’ve got 6 pickup scenes now in 3 days...

The actual GOH diary, Day 2

Hey, if you like reading raw, brutally-honest diaries then you might like the new "Bounty" blog I've begun recently! Check it out if you like reading about misery in filmmaking!

Day 2(11/8/10): If you thought Day One was bad...

At the Cloister’s Castle.


Knew it was gonna be a bad day when I couldn’t remember Jared(the D.P.’s) name when I opened my phone to call him. I mean, I’ve only worked with him on two films...but my brain ain’t firing.


Should have been pretty easy. Showed up early. There’s an extra there already who got called too early. Also a guy named Habib who’s coming out to help a couple of nights.


We set up—the rooms we were shooting in were right next to each other, so it should have been easy.


But we fell behind. Not massively, but by about an hour.


An internet bud and horror host Rob Dimension drives all the way up from New Jersey to be a featured extra, and brings a friend, which is cool. Getting extras can be a problem(and HAS in the past for me)...


Wrangling them is okay, but a couple of them leave after like two hours. So we don’t have many to choose from. Then we get a call mid-shoot that Lauren Lakis, the actress playing one of the roles in the next scenes, was in a car accident. Car totalled.


They say she’s fine and is willing to come out. Not sure whether that will be okay, but it works out. We shoot the stair sequence and then another sequence with her character and she's great.


We’re like 3 hours behind now though.


Quick break and we move to setup outside and everything goes BAD. The Red camera stops connecting to the hard drive. Jared can’t make it work. Calls the guy who owns it—he didn’t include the firmware update. We try to download it—we get it after like an hour, because they only have dial-up internet at the Castle.


We install it but it’s a different build than we already recorded, so we can’t record to that hard drive unless we erase what we shot. So we can only shoot on CF cards, of which we have 2 four gig cards—8 total minutes of film.


By this time it’s like 3:30am—we need to be out of there at 5am(per the Castle's rules). Luckily we can leave shit there. We try to shoot some outside stuff but we can’t tell focus that well and the Red keeps shutting off—it’s a disaster. We finally just call it at 4:45am after getting some dogshit.


Jared freaks. He’s yelling. Calls the douche who owns it and tries to find another Red.


I’m beat. Demoralized. Get home, back up some stills, back in bed by 7am.