A “short” day of filming – right?
No.
Today I had the crew to my place with James to film the bedroom scenes as we couldn’t use the bedrooms at the original location. I had to deconstruct my room then reset it with the set while the guys went to Royal Park and filmed James waking up/walking towards the “house”. Once they were back we set the blue room scenes and filmed, then changed everything and reset as the red room. Today we had to be more time conscious as James had to leave by 3 and there was a lot of time spent dealing with the smoke machine and changing sets. In the end I pushed the guys pretty hard and we ended up wrapping right when James and Ben needed to leave so that was great.
I then cooked us three lunch and all we needed to do was the stop motion. Easy.
That was 3pm.
Joel set his camera up in the position then let Willa go wild. I was taking the photos for her as she was applying the blood to my bed (which I was very scared about staining my mattress or making my room stink like strawberry jam). Joel sat in my dining room organising the footage. It was clear after about 15 mins that this was going to take a very long time so I ended up helping Willa apply the blood as best I could. Joel had to leave to go to work so he left the camera with us with a final request of “don’t get any sticky shit on my camera”
So he’s gone, we are trucking along with the stop motion and then Willa accidentally knocks the tripod losing our frame. We waste about 20 mins trying to get it back to exactly where it was before, with no avail. The camera battery is running out, and Joel didn’t leave his camera. Then we have an idea to use a different angle and just deal with what it looks like, but as Willa was figuring out that angle she accidentally turns a screw and Joel’s camera falls into the blood. LIKE DIRECTLY into the blood.
Needless to say that was the end of the stop motion. We ended up trying to give it a clean, I own a film camera and have experience in things getting between the focus and the zoom but because this was digital and JOELS we just tried our best to get anything off that we could. Willa took the hit and said she would go get it checked out and we packed up and reset my room.
An unfortunate end to the 3 day shoot, but it was fun. Besides getting headaches from the sickly sweet smell of blood and watery eyes from staring into coloured lights for three days we pulled through and survived… Now I hope that Joel’s camera does.