First Day of Shooting!

Well, first day of shooting is completed.  I did not know it was possible to be so sore just from standing around telling people what to do for 12 hours.  In what I'm sure is a totally unrelated coincidence all of the crew guys were skinny...perhaps I should look into that.

I think the footage we got is fantastic - the lighting is dark and hard and moody just like I envisioned.  The actors nailed their parts. 

We started in the room of a seedy motel and our crew had to build a huge cave in order to block out the sun going into the windows but still leave room to put our own lights there. 

We ended up tearing apart both rooms we rented in order to switch beds and then use all the linens to help block light. The other room was for staging, but it wasn't exactly a relaxing environment either.

Inside the room it was hot and steamy and had too many people, but we got into a rhythm pretty quickly and ended up doing 21 setups in about 4 hours.










From there we moved to the convenience store and started getting exteriors.  Our contact there Josh was awesome - he kept the place open for us to go inside and cool off as well as buy much needed drinks and supplies.  He even got into one of the shots as an extra.

The crew again was super fast, laying out dolly track and lighting both inside and outside the store in short order and we started making up some of the time we lost earlier in the day.  We ended up two hours over, but we did get all our shots.  I guess it's also not a real film shoot unless the police show up, but Josh was able to convince him we had the owner's permission and I had an email from a city employee saying that as long as we were not interfering with the public we didn't need a permit.  The email actually said "It is my understanding you don't need a permit" but fortunately he didn't make me show it to him.

I'm still trying to figure out a decent way to link to facebook albums (stupid facebook), but here are some pics from set taken by out lead actor: http://www.facebook.com/#!/album.php?aid=2063690&id=1327537405  and our Hair and Makeup person: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=lf#!/album.php?aid=174012&id=720763699.

This week is more prep, finalizing a restaurant location and then the marathon 3 days of shooting over the weekend.