Second day of filming
Obviously, the novelty of counting the days of filming will be lost if I ever land a feature film, or even another short for that matter. I’m not really counting the days of filming for this particular project so much as I’m chronicling the first ever days of my filming experiences.
Today went pretty well. We shot three scenes–two interior and one exterior. The interior scenes were fun and a lot easier than the exterior scenes have been. For one thing, I was sitting down for most of the shoot, rather than standing in cruddy shoes on hard dirt. For another, everyone felt closer, which made it feel more like a big group effort than a sort of sprawled production.
The second interior scene we shot is the last scene in the film. One of the little funny things the director has thrown in is that my character wears the most hideous sweaters ever, and they get worse as the film goes on. So, during the last scene, he’s wearing an old-lady sweater with terrible colors (basically black with bright green, pink and yellow patterns and little balls sewn into the shoulders). Also, it had shoulder pads. Anyway, the other actor and I felt that it was a little awkward to end the scene the way it was written. We thought it would be appropriate for the other character to comment on how good my sweater looks (because it would contrast with an earlier scene where he calls my sweaters “Cosby Sweaters”). So, we ad-libbed a couple lines about my sweater at the end. Anyway, my reaction to one of the other character’s comments kept making people laugh… in fact, on one take, one of the sound guys and the director laughed out loud. The irony is that those are probably the two people who should be most upset about someone laughing out loud while the film is rolling.
Anyway, it was fun. The exterior scene was a pain because it was drizzling and it took forever to set up (even though it was only about a 45 second scene). Tomorrow, all our scenes are outside, so I’m not really looking forward to that. The good news is I don’t have to be on location till noon and we’ll be wrapping tomorrow evening.
So far, it’s been a blast. I can’t believe people actually get to do this for a living.