Saturday, July 31, 2010
Day four.
Another good day. Today we shot the scenes where Luke meets up with the entire crew for the first time, hear cops, and they take off over a wall. They hear more cops but Luke has busted his leg so Theresa comes in and heals him. It should’ve been a simple scene shot on two sides of a wall, but here in Spokane, no such alley exists. So, with the magic of editing, and a little CGI, we’ll be able to make the shots match (I hope). The alley itself was in downtown Spokane, with the wall at West Valley High School, our training ground.
My day started with a few texts from actors wanting to know if we were going to shoot in the rain. I told them of course and that I wanted it to rain as it adds production value to the scene. August Wyssman (my scripty from my last two movies) arrived to pick me up around 11:25am. We then headed to downtown Spokane to meet up with everyone else. The plan was to meet at noon, but our last actor arrived at 12:15. Just as we were about to walk to the location, a store owner came out and told us that it wasn’t public parking. I told him we were shooting a student project in Riverfront park and that we’d only be an hour. He said that was okay. As we started walking, Alex turned to me and asked if I’ve ever considered a career in public relations because I’m “so good at bullshitting”. It took us about ten minutes walking through Riverfront Park to get to the alley location. I first took a couple of shots of the skyline down there to add into the shots we’d be shooting at the school. We shot the scene right after the crew lands from coming over the wall, they meet Luke, hear sirens, and run out frame as if they’re running up the wall. Then we moved down the alley to the other side of our “imaginary wall” and shot what we needed over there. Finally, Ben Baker (Luke) and I went out to the street and shot his lead-in for that scene. After that we headed back to the cars. I went back inside the shop to thank the guy again for letting us park there. Cool guy. The shop is called “Crazy G’s”. Figured I’d plug it since he let us stay.
Next we drove back to the Valley to shoot at the school. The angles here were pretty boring, but it didn’t matter as we only needed the wall that supposedly divides the alley. Filming at the school took about 45 minutes and we were done! August dropped me off at my apartment and I started making backups of the footage as well as converting it into the offline form. By 5:00pm, just two hours after shooting, I was already cutting. My sister then came and picked me up for dinner with my parents. I took my camera and showed them some of the footage. Their jaws had to be picked up off the ground. I got back home around 10:30pm and finished cutting the scene in about 20 minutes. To my delight, everything cuts together perfectly! Many of the shots will need the set extensions, as well as color correction to match the locations, but even without them they cut together well.
Something new I’ve started on this film is actually keeping track of which actors have worked which days and also which scenes were shot, how many gigs were used to record them, how long they took, etc… I figure if I ever get to do a larger budget film they’ll expect me to be able to provide this info so I might as well start now. As I’ve said before, this flick has been quite the learning experience.
It has been great making a film for the Lord, as we have been given everything we need weather-wise, location-wise, and actor-wise. Literally, within 15 minutes of wrapping, the sun suddenly came out. I still didn’t have a Crystal for the shoot tomorrow so I called up a friend of mine, Chelsea Raugust and she said she’d do it! I’m telling you, leave horror films alone, commit to Christ and make the movie that God wants you to make. He knows how to make a movie better than anyone and will make sure that things happen as needed, especially if it’s for His glory.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. Tomorrow we shoot the greenscreen portion of the Leap crew’s part of the car chase, so wish us luck!
