I felt weird before day 6 even started. Kind of uneasy and kind of anxious but I couldn’t really place what it was until it hit me out of the blue like a sack of bricks. I’m not one to get migraines, maybe once or twice a year, but when they hit, they hit me like a hammer and instead of the usual aura of wonky peripheral vision, it was something like a panic attack.
Part of what I learned from Stygian was that you have to keep people peppy and you have to keep them unaware of what’s going on beneath your chill exterior. I could do that to a certain degree here, but there were some things that I couldn’t help, this isn’t something that’s all that easy to hide. In any case, I was going to have to barrel through it. I threw on my sunglasses, took a handful of aspirin and got to work.
Of all the weeks for this to happen, to this was one of the worst. Granted, none of the other weeks would’ve been good. But today, I had some reel bait — and a really cool shot in general — planned. There was a 5.5 page long segment where all the cast members sort of converge at the party after the weird stuff starts happening to them. I wanted to do all of that in one take. In order to do that, I was going to be on top of my game.
For the shot, we faced some of the same challenges that we faced the previous day re lenses. Ideally, we would’ve shot it on a long lens in a studio. It would have been done on a 35 or a 50. When you’re dealing with people in a corner on one side of the set and people in another corner on the other side of the set, you need a longer lens. There was a lot of action in there and in order to get it all, the 18 was going to be our only option. But, when you consider how the room was laid out, getting it all in one take was an uphill battle.
Sunglasses inside #migrainestyle
The AD this week, Jimbo, is a buddy of mine and he came up with a good way to get the shot based on the room layout and the lens we were using. I wanted to do it all in one take, but having an alternative wouldn’t hurt. Jimbo blocked some things out and suggested that we get hinge reverse shots. We would be able to get most of it in one take, but it would also allow for us to cut in pieces from other takes that we liked better than any of the long takes. This would help us in not being totally screwed if we wanted to add stuff in later. We ended up adding in one or two shots, but not a lot and I like the way it turned out. In an ideal world, we would have been able to do this in a studio and had more than the 2 hours of prep time we did. We would have been able to block it more and run it more, maybe even have an entire day where we could block. However, with everyone’s work schedules, that was something that just wasn’t going to happen. The cutaways might work better in the end anyway, given the lens we had to use and how the room was shaped. It’s hard to be a genius auteur when you have virtually no time to prepare and you’re basically shooting everything guerrilla style.
I’m interested to see how things turn out when we get to editing it. Again, we wrapped a few hours early. Morale was really waning today among the crew, and especially myself. The mental toll is starting to show but with two weekends left, we just gotta push through and keep on keeping on.