Prologue

In my last blog towards the end, I stated that I was excited to start production on my latest film “Writer’s Block” and oh boy was it a trip. On March 11th, my roommate Connor and I went to our friend’s house to set the living room and kitchen for shooting that weekend. We brought with us what we thought was all the gear we’d need (remember that) and dressed everything. We messed around with some lighting and some camera shots for day one and felt prepared and excited to work on the new project. The following night March 12th my friend Akshay who was casted as The Writer came over with his brother and we all hung out and watched the movie “Being John Malkovich”.

Towards the end of the movie my other actor/roommate Caleb texted me saying that he just looked at his schedule for the 13th and 14th and found out he works until 5pm on Sunday which caught me off. I quickly was trying to rearrange scenes for the next two days and figure out what we need to shoot on the 13th and what can wait for on the 14th. It was a mess because everything we prepped on the 11th, is what we were going to shoot that first day but now we were filming stuff on the first day we didn’t even prepare for and I went to bed knowing that.

Day 1 6:30am

I couldn’t sleep at all the night before, as much as I was frustrated at Caleb, I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve who couldn’t wait to open all the gifts the following morning. As I left my house alone, I gathered donuts and coffee for everyone and when I arrived Ariel and I started setting everything up for the day. We decided to start filming Akshay’s solo scenes that we initially planned for and when Caleb arrived, we’d jump into their scenes together. It sounded concrete but there was one huge piece of the puzzle that would halt production for a little while that we were unaware of. We shot two of the five solo Akshay scenes before Caleb arrived and when he got on set, we decided to take lunch and then set up for the scenes with them together. The scenes solo with Akshay had barely if no dialogue so the microphone was attached to the camera, but the scenes with Caleb and Akshay are extremely dialogue heavy so we needed to detach the mic and place it on a boom pole with an aux cable.

 I assumed Matias who was letting us use his camera and mic had the boom pole and aux cord since that was the same setup we used for Getaway, I was wrong. So, I sent Connor and Amanda on a mission to go find an aux cord for us. While they were gone, we’d set up the lighting in the kitchen, block out the scene, and do a few rehearsals with the actors. It got to a point though where this thirty-minute errand was turning into almost an hour and a half going from store to store with it being sold out everywhere. And then it hit me we were the ones who had the boom and aux. So, I quickly called my third and final roommate who was still at home and asked him to meet us halfway with the gear and a little over two hours behind schedule we began shooting again. It was rough. We started filming at 9am and wrapped around 11:30pm that first day, exhausted we drove home to sleep and pick everything up the next day and do it all over again.

Day 2 11:45am

As I got ready to leave the next day, we decided to push the call time to 1pm to catch up on some sleep. I arrived back on set around 12:45pm and started eating my lunch with Amanda and Ariel. Matias said he wouldn’t be able to make it until 3:30pm which was fine, and Caleb would be arriving around 6pm. After eating we started organizing the mess we left the night prior and set up for the remainder of Akshay’s solo scenes. I wanted to start shooting by 2pm but Akshay and Connor didn’t arrive till about 2:30pm and we didn’t start filming till a little after 3pm so we were already behind schedule. One of Akshay’s solo scenes was a little more time consuming than I originally thought and we finished two of his scenes by 6pm and were moving into the kitchen for his final scene when Caleb arrived (at this point I wanted to be done with the solo stuff but that wasn’t the case).

After the last solo scene was done, we moved back into the study to finish out the final portion of the dialogue and warp for the weekend. I pulled Ariel to the side and we started talking about the scene, we looked at each other and realized we were going to be here till 2:30am at the earliest (it was cute thinking that). Everything went smooth. It just was a long day, at the end of it Ariel, Matias, and I were the last ones on set. We left Ariel’s house around 4:45am Monday morning. Matias and I grabbed some breakfast and sat on my deck while exporting the footage to my laptop, my head hit the pillow at 7:15am. 

Epilogue

It was a long 48 hours, but man was it so worth it in the end. The following Friday I did a quick rough edit of everything we captured, and it came out to fourteen minutes which was impressive! We still have four scenes to film and two pick up shots that we missed over the weekend. As of now it’s up in the air when we will be able to shoot the next scenes, but it will be in April hopefully, I can find out soon!