Sunday, May 26, 2013

IN THE SHADOWS OF NOVEMBER UPDATE

We are so close to getting the shooting finished I some times want to scream!  Almost there. One full scene, 2/3rds of another, then the exterior fight scenes and this portion of it is done.  The biggest difficulty in this production has been organizing to get people together at the same time.  It's a constant process with last minute changes.  There are things I've had to throw out because of scheduling but we are getting lots of good performances.
I was trying to get the other half of a trading post scene done yesterday.  We shot Jenn's footage a few weeks ago in front of a green screen but had to get the other two actors together at the same time.  Luckily in the scene Jenn's character was on one side of a table full of weapons and the rest were gun dealers on the other side.  We could shoot them separately and edit them together in post.  I also shot a few seconds of Jenn with her back to the camera looking at the green screen so, if possible, I could put her in the foreground.
I found an actor, John, to play Rick the gun dealer and had an actress to play his wife.  I tried to schedule the actress for ten days but got no response from phone or email messages.  I tried to line up someone else in the last few days but nobody was definitely interested.
I got to PATV and set up the scene.  Someone had used the tarp I had bought to stand in for a tent wall and there was lots of stage blood on it so I had to clean that off.  I managed to get it into presentable shape.  John was there and ready to go but still no actress.  I decided to shoot the scene twice.  We did it once as written, camera on John, and had him look to his left as I read the actresses dialogue.  Then we shot it again but I gave John the wife's lines, changed them a bit, and had him refer to his wife as being off in another part of the tent.  This way I have the choice of how to use the scene.  The small bits we had to rewrite we did keeping in mind that Jenn's dialogue was already shot.  
Right off I can call the scene done and edit it with the second version.  I'm planning on keeping it that way unless I would hear from someone who really wanted to be in a scene.  
Still waiting to hear from one actor for next weekend's shoot.