Yesterday we finally had our second shoot. It feels bizarre that it was only our second when it feels like it should be the fourth or fifth by the amount of work that was put into the cancelled shoots, and how long it has been since we first shot. It went well, all things considered. Due to the chaos of the past few weeks, I feel we have definitely lost our momentum and general organisation that made the first shoot so successful and had us on track to get up to three new episodes made by the end of the semester. This is really unfortunate (to be clearer, this sucks) but there is no use dwelling on what could have been.
After our two meetings on Tuesday (where only half of us were present)- with Paul and Rachel and with the writers, we started to organise the shoot for Friday. I don’t know how much of plan there was before then for what we were going to shoot and when, there mightn’t have been one at all. I think there was a loose and ideal plan that didn’t have any finer details confirmed. Which meant I had some work as AD to work out what was going to happen when and with who.
Between the Tuesday and the Friday, we confirmed that Mitch and Brittany would be available to shoot- we wanted to shoot a few short scenes from episode one that would help make the rest of the episode make more sense- i.e. fill in the B line that we originally cut out. This technically included a scene with the vampire Christian but due to uncertainty as to who would play Christian, we replaced him with Carl (Mitch). This was one of a few executive decisions I made as AD to get us moving again and get through any obstacles (which I expected to face, given our history). Luckily, the scenes were easily adaptable, and so we had a plan if anything happened and Brittany couldn’t make it. Which was good, because she couldn’t in the end.
Throughout this week and when shooting I felt a vague yet strong sense of frustration. I felt like I was making a lot of decisions in the dark, unaware of if they’d already been made, if people would agree, if it was the right decision, so on and so forth. Throughout all this frustration, which wasn’t helped by sparse online contact and response to my messages, I just knew I had to move forward and get things done despite my uncertainty. In this way, I am proud of myself for objectively moving on from the chaos of the past few weeks (which involved emotions for many people) and taking initiative on working out our plan.
So after Brittany/Arabella fell through, I suggested we just replace the scene she was meant to be in- Arabella and Christian/Carl in line for soda machine, Christian/Carl make annoying remark to Arabella- with a similar scene, with a generic line of people that look hot and communicate the idea that the office is overheated. We all worked out together what would work best before shooting, and had a few of the crew step in as actors. The rest of the shoot was pretty efficient. There wasn’t too much for me to do as AD on the day, as the set was pretty casual as we didn’t have much to shoot and there weren’t too many people there, which really meant I didn’t need to run the set much at all.
Inevitably the session wasn’t bound to be completely issue-free. There were some minor frustrations amongst the crew with a writer who didn’t understand the significance of an allocated director and thought it was okay to give input whenever he felt like it (all of the time). I know I signed up to boss people around, but honestly, I still didn’t feel totally comfortable telling him he needed to stop giving his two cents. I tried, by saying that he needed to step back because Matilda (the director) is the one to make a lot of these decisions. It kind of worked. I know he has/had a vision from writing it and I respect that he can have helpful ideas. However, at the end of the day, my main concern is that this is our project as much as the writers, and we already are stretched for roles between the ten of us. There is simply no room for more input without taking some away from our crew.
Simultaneously there was some serious disengagement from crew members who didn’t care for the production after the recent meltdown. I completely understand this, and just moved on with everyone who was there and committed to getting it done.
Overall it went well. We overcame our setbacks by adapting to fix the problem and made something that is pretty decent (I think) given the circumstances. After packing up, we read through the script for episode two which the writers had just finished. (Another quick note of disbelief… only the second script? In week 11? How did this happen?!) It was a bit longer than we wanted, but it wasn’t bad. I had a chuckle here and there. They wrote in another character, which is rather frustrating given it made the character count exceed the initial request from us (2-3 characters) by another 3 characters. Oh well… It’s all about getting on with the show now…
(Pre-production for ep 2 to start next week!)