Super Distraction
It was a very fine Super Bowl 43 despite the lack of Philadelphia Eagles. Bruce started his set with 10th Avenue Freeze Out and the audience knew the words. Cardinal Offensive person number 11 had the nicest tush I’ve ever seen in football. And the score was so close that it didn’t beat the spread. I had lovely wings to eat and a lot of ads to laugh at. I’m looking forward to GI Joe and Transformers 2 which both look stupid but kick ass. I’m surprised to want to see Land of the Lost considering that I really hated the TV show, but Will Farrell won me over. And Star Trek still hasn’t told me what the actual film is about nor did it make me laugh or think it was bad assed. In my opinion, it remains doomed to failure. Now, that I’ve gotten past that, on to last week. This will not be as long a blog as I’d intended. I’m still recovering from two days of madness. I’ll post supplements during the week.
Ghosts of Film Shoots Past
I knew it was going to be an odd week early on when I had what was one of the strangest thoughts to date during a production related meeting. I think ‘Is that grenade real?’ narrowly beats ‘How did I miss the 3 foot pentagram?’ for oddness. This was not, however, the oddest sentence to be uttered by me this week. It was definitely not the oddest thing I said during those two days in Santa Clarita. I think that would be ‘I am not asking Aaron if he has on underwear.’
Despite the new odd things that happened, I was struck by how many of our little company were bringing the baggage from previous shoots to this one. Marguerite and I were nearly paralyzed with dread figuring out what to have on the craft services table. Many of our most difficult moments during all of our shoots save for The Gunslinger trailer centered around food. These awkward moments have nearly shut down our shoots. Thus, I was as nervous as Marguerite over this matter. As it turned out, we did fine. There was much happy snacking and no complaints. A big thanks to Matty for providing the excellent coffee.
We had other anxieties going into that shoot. Our previous location in that area was one very low on amenities. There was a barely working toilet that I plunged repeatedly during two different shoots and nowhere to sit and eat. I made sure that we had our own toilet paper, paper towels and hand soap. I even put in reservations for a table and chair rental. These worries were for naught. One of the people involved with this location had been through the difficulties of the Demon Under Glass shoot. Thus, we needn’t have been concerned. There were very nice amenities even in the storage warehouse for the soundstage. There was more than one bathroom with all the proper paper products and hand soap. And there was a full sized, working fridge. That part of the shoot was nicely covered. However, this location was as soundproofed as the other one (though a quarter of the price to rent). The immense building was made of corrugated sheet metal, and the Santa Ana winds were blowing ferociously from the desert. The whole building shook from time to time, creating an amazing din. This didn’t matter the first day as we weren’t recording dialogue. On day tow, the winds weren’t quite as bad and the sound man had an idea on how to minimize noise. I haven’t heard the final tracks yet, so I don’t know if he was successful. If not, there is always ADR. Jon had his own deep misgivings born of ghosts of film shoots past. He was so accustomed of making locations from nothing that he wasn’
t convinced that the empty warehouse we’d rented could pass as an abandoned warehouse even after seeing the photos. It caused me no end of consternation until we reached the site. Despite how well our previous efforts had gone, I had no idea until then how many of us had been traumatized by them. Mind you, none of us had the common sense to opt out of these high risk, high effort endeavors. Oh no... though, in our defense, we had heard that doing ‘no budget’ proofs of concept were now all the rage even with big studios. The nifty company that rented all of our bad-assed military gear was doing much the same thing at the behest of Sony and with some very big names. So, we’re not entirely nuts. I must admit, however, that I found that information more than a little depressing.All of the elements were in place. The question that remained was could these flesh and blood characters match those that had lived in my prose and in my head for more than two years?
Next time: Anime vs Yaoi.
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