Day 2 of Shooting Clean Kill: An Unfortunate Series of Events

 Hello again! This will be a much shorter update blog post (and I really mean it this time, there isn't much to say) that will discuss how shooting was with all of my minor characters. As you can probably tell from the title, things didn't go particularly well.

The biggest issue for today was the pressure of running out of time, from all kinds of factors (Sam had to be done by 4, we started at 3.30, Martina had to go to work, Wade had to study for a test, and even nature seemed to rebel against me- it appeared as if it would rain soon). But as if the time pressure wasn't enough, I had organized this to start at 3 pm, about 15 minutes after school. However, the traffic to get out of the school parking lot was atrocious, made even worse by the fact that I had gotten to school late this morning, meaning I was parked in the very back. This turned a tight window to escape the parking lot into a death sentence, trapping me in the car line for 20 minutes, making me late to my own production...

    Needless to say, I was frustrated, the actors were frustrated, and the clock continued ticking. But my troubles weren't over yet. I had forgotten to mark where my car was parked the first time we shot film, meaning that the background was different and didn't match up. After 15 minutes of trying to guess the exact location I parked, I realized I had only 10 minutes with the actors before they had to leave, and I had shot nothing.

    Tired, frustrated, and a little desperate, I called them over to the spot I was, and just did one take of the scene. They acted perfectly, but they were victims of my bad luck in the day, and poor planning. I take full responsibility of this, and am embarrassed to have been thwarted by such a silly mistake as not remembering where I parked.  We did the one take, after an hour of waiting and setting up, and regardless of how it turned out, I knew it was the footage I had to work with.

This stretch of bad luck 
had me VERY stressed..

I thanked Sam and Martina for their time and apologized profusely about the circumstances, and then I shot Wade's scene, which I think turned out much better, mostly because it didn't rely on any background scenery that was already established. I mulled some things over with him afterwards, and fooled around a little after getting the shot to lift our spirits, and then I drove him home.

Overall, this has been a learning experience. First of all, I should always be the first one on the set, I never want a repeat of what the actors had to wait through as I ran late to my own event, especially after stressing the time limit we were working with. Second, if I plan to shoot in a location more than once, I should document everything about the environment to maintain consistency. And finally, I need to get a better parking spot... that was my true Achilles' heel today.

I'm going to shoot again with Cesar and Blake on Wednesday, which is when we plan to tackle filming the gas station scenes (which should be much easier, considering that it mostly consists of two shots and countershots to illustrate their conversation). All I have to worry about on Wednesday is getting my actors to remember their lines, and we'll be set for Thursday, when we'll film the murder bathroom scene and finish up any loose ends. Until then, I'll see you around!