useless

The Monday after a weekend of shooting I am completely useless. This weekend was particularly tough because we started shooting on Friday night. I don't think I got any behind the scenes pics this weekend, but here's the report of what went down.

Friday
We grabbed some exterior shots of Claire's House for a few different scenes. Shogo pulled off quite a few different looks that will get progressively more ominous the farther we get into the movie. Jessica got to do more "scared running" with no shoes on. She was pretty bruised up from last weekend so we tried to take it a little easy on her this time. A pretty severe lightning storm was coming in so we couldn't shoot the footage of Frank and Claire walking at night. We also were too slow to get the sunrise shot.

Saturday
We knocked it way out of the park and shot almost ten pages in three different locations including a pretty complicated fight scene with a special effect. And we banged out a quickie commercial for BLUE 7 where we were shooting. Thanks to Rusty and Regan for letting us shoot in the alley behind their store.

Location 1: 66 Bowl Bar. We got two scenes. Sound is always a nightmare at this location, but the footage looks great and performances were solid.

Location 2: John's tiny apartment, doubling as Owen's place. One Scene and a cool insert of Frank ascending a metal staircase.

Location 3: The alley behind Blue 7 which will serve as the alley behind the evil strip joint. Leather Girl vs. Frank in hand-to-hand and foot-to-testicle combat. John once again proved his skills at physical acting by throwing himself against trash dumpsters, walls and shopping carts. John also found a pet cat that was hanging out in the alley looking for a friend. She was watching us from a distance and we weren't even sure if it was a cat or not. Once we fed her, she quickly made herself at home. Leah picked up some litter and other cat supplies to get him started. He named her Blue. We started mixing Seagrams and Sprite in the alley around 2 a.m. and wrapped at about 4 a.m.

It was exhausting, but easily the most fun day of shooting for me so far. Shogo is concerned about the quality of the footage and whether the lighting will cut together well, but I'm really happy with it so far.

Sunday
In contrast to the excellent day before, this was my least favorite day of shooting. I hated every minute of it. Some of it could have been avoided by better location planning, but some days things just work against you. Nevertheless, we got about five pages - the Leather Girl interrogation scene. The motel room we rented was tiny and HOT. And the scene was fighting us every step of the way. The shots look good, the performances are excellent, but it was hell.

We wrapped around 11:00 and John, Shogo, Leah and I went to IHOP.

A few random grabs

These are from Day 3. I found these on my hard drive and can't even remember why I made them but thought i might as well post them. These are quick grabs before any color correction or image sweetening.

dvd compulsive

We are still tearing down the warehouse set. We've restocked the refrigerator to replace all the stuff we drank. I wish I had a little warehouse space permanently where I could build sets etc. and not have to tear them down so quickly. Particularly for the next project. But even for simple sets, it would be nice to have the space.

So we were up there until a little after 1:00 and decided to go to IHOP afterwards. They forgot to bring me syrup which caused a huge ruckus in the kitchen when I complained. There was definitely some racial tension between the white waitresses and the middle eastern manager and front desk lady. But I got my syrup and a 50% discount.

Today i have actually managed to get some work done. I need to just force myself to spend more "desk" time. I'm wrapping up a few little projects that have straggled on for far too long. Then i am going to work on the schedule for this weekend and figure out if we can secure a few locations by this weekend. I need a producer or maybe just an assistant to make phone calls for me, etc.

I met up with Shogo at best buy today and bought the Martin Scorcese collection and DUEL. I haven't opened them yet and am still deliberating on whether or not I should return them. The monetary reserves are starting to get a little low and as much as I would like to hear these commentaries and study these films, I'm not sure it is a wise decision at this time. I have to get all my shit under control to make this work.

today i need to
1. finally finish up the yogamaggie site
2. make contact with launchpad about exquisite leather
3. get the phone number for the closed down strip joint
4. work on clearing the warehouse some more
5. Hopefully watch DUEL.

weird science

We shot a chunk from the climax of the movie. Huge acclaim must go to Leah for awesome production design and Dave Curd for going way above and beyond the call of duty to help bring the set to life. The awesome drawings on the wall are the work of Dave and you can check out more of his stuff at davecurd.com. Details to come...

second weekend notes.

John Oak Dalton asked for me to reboot my brain and provide details about what's been going on, so here is an attempt. I'm not guaranteeing it will be interesting, but this is as much to document the process for me as it is for you.



Pre-shoot - Thursday

I completely freaked out. This is some stressful shit.


Principal Photography Day 3 - Friday

Friday is normally the least busy day for 66 Bowl, so we arranged to shoot there in the morning. Unfortunatey, just as we got set up to shoot a field trip from a pre-school or something showed up with 50 screaming kids. This made getting sound a nightmare, but we got some beautiful shots. This was the first shooting day for John Howell (frank) so I asked him to walk in to the bowling alley in full costume. The result was a bunch of freaked out pre-schoolers who were convinced that Michael Myers was there to bowl and kill them. We knocked out two scenes, but as mentioned before, the sound is pretty bad. We will have to figure out a plan B for getting these shots.

After that we headed back to Sharpe central for the big "undressing" scene between Frank and Claire. This took most of the rest of the day to shoot because the make-up application took about three hours. While we were waiting, Shogo and I banged out some footage of Jessica (Claire) for use in a flashback sequence. Shogo was feeling sick so I gave him some Non-Drowsy Cold medication which soon had him buzzing like a crank addict. With his renewed energy we finished off the undressing scene and decided to go ahead and get the scene we had planned for the next morning. We set up some 2k lights outside the bedroom window and blasted them in. This was around 1:00 a.m. But we got the scene and it looks amazing.

We were all dead tired when we wrapped at about 3 a.m. I had to wash the sheets because John's black arm had left brown marks all over them.

Principal Photography Day 4 - Saturday

We started shooting a little bit late, probably a mistake to push back the call time. But our first scene, the kitchen scene looked great. It starts out with a cool LEON inspired dolly shot. For inserts we put the camera inside the refrigerator and inside a cabinet on a lazy susan. We got a lot of coverage and Kassy was really good as the tired, stumbling into the kitchen Zoe. After that, we set up in our living room set and got two more scenes involving Frank, Claire and Zoe. We were losing sunlight fast and decided not to go for the exterior shots. We sent most everybody home and then shot the build-up to Zoe's murder scene. I don't want to give anything away, but Shogo shot some great footage. By the time we wrapped up, it was about 1 a.m. again and we were all in need of gin and tonics. This soon led to further misadventures which I can will only describe as FIRST TIME PORN WRECKED. It was all documented and should appear on the bootleg DVD as an easter egg. It will be well hidden, but you won't want to miss it. Joseph is now the officially designated supplier of contraband for this production.

Principal Photography Day 5 - Sunday

Joseph continued his contraband duties by provided a sweet switchblade today for an upcoming fight sequence. We started out with Claire and Dirk's makeout scene which went really well. Jessica and John were both great sports The resulting scene is really great, but maybe a little less dark and evil than I had intended because they were both obviously having a good time and laughing a lot. Then we moved on to the Frank wake up and attack and the hallway scuffle. I've already edited this sequence and it looks really good. Dirk's pummelling is very visceral and real. Maybe less comic-booky than I had intended. I had originally envisioned lots of cuts, but these guys look like they are really fighting and it works better in one take. You'll know what I mean when you see it. The whole scene somehow ended up as an Argento tribute with red and blue gels and dark lighting. It looks pretty amazing. Once again, not what I had originally envisioned, but better I think. We need to re-shoot Claire and Zoe at the end of the hall because we shot that first without knowing what the actual fight was going to look like. It's much scarier and more intense than what they were intending to react to.

Also, Leah suggested a good script change that will cut down on a driving at night scene, so I am pretty excited. I think we will take care of this during the reshoots this upcoming weekend.

John Stewart went above and beyond the call of duty in his stunts. Not only did he actually hit himself in the head with a baseball bat (on accident), he broke in one of my walls, even though his fall was cushioned with a futon mattress. Dave Curd saw him at work the other day and said he was hobbling around like an old man with a big bruise on his forehead. Way to take one for the team, John. But his performance is great and Dirk is funnier and more hate-able than we had hoped.

making movies is hard

Three solid days of shooting. We got some good stuff that really composes the heart of the movie. This is emotional stuff that will determine whether SEX MACHINE really works or not.

Gold star this week goes to JESSICA for doing a great job, taking direction incredibly well and having an amazing attitude no matter what we asked her to do. She did draw the line at letting John throw knives at her head.

My brain is too fried to even recount what all went down, but here are this weeks behind-the-scenes photos...