We received our equipment Tuesday afternoon (the 20th), shot Tuesday night from 8 PM - Midnight. That night was interesting, as the parking deck we had kept our car (and equipment) in closed at 11, so I was sprinting across Atlanta in my costume for that scene and got to the deck as the attendant was leaving in his own car. Luckily, he waited for me to get my car and then I rushed back so we could finish the scene (our location closed at midnight). That night I got home and edited the scene together on the Macbook Pro CMF let us borrow, and got to sleep around 6 AM.
School the next day wasn't fun - we were up at 10 AM for Melissa's class at noon. I worked on finalizing some of the music tracks (I already had prepared a little during the few days before CMF) and we had to shoot that night as that was our only chance to shoot with my cousin's fiancee, Adam. It was 18 degrees that night and our main character's costume wasn't too warm, to say the least. Anyway, we pulled through, at many points I was holding reflectors for the florescent lights we had set up and tossing Javier's jacket to him back and forth as soon as the shots began and ended. We got done about 1 AM, and I stayed up all night (again) editing that scene - I had to figure out how to time the scenes right, as Adam's monologue had to sync up with certain images on screen, but many of the shots didn't last long enough to fill in that time, and the actions of his cigarette didn't match up right - but pulling a little from here and there and splitting clips up into multiple sections made it work.
Thursday our main actor wasn't available - so we couldn't really shoot anything. I gave Mo (Lumumba) the Macbook Pro so he could do some visual effects on the scene we had shot the first day - I thought this would mean I could have a break, but I ended up staying up all night (again) finishing up the music tracks and recording our dialogue for the first scene, as well as writing the script for the following days. That night Patrick, Steve and I recorded "Whalin'," the only live audio track for the film, and Pat mastered it later that night - it took about 4 hrs to record and get it sounding perfect. I spent most of the rest of the night racking my brain trying to figure out how the first scene could segue into the second scene without getting boring. I figured it out at about 5 AM.
Friday me and Mo talked my idea for the second scene over - He didn't like it, but didn't really have a better alternative. After I pitched it to him really hard, he came around and said that it had grown on him. We were supposed to shoot the first and last scenes that morning and then shoot the fourth scene that night, but Mo couldn't get in touch with Javier or something, so we didn't end up doing the first and last scenes. Pushing it, but still manageable. The fourth scene (shot on skateboards) went off pretty much without a hitch, aside from me taking a huge spill from filming one direction while riding another. Luckily I felt the fall coming, so I tucked the camera under my body and did a few somersaults off the board. It was rough, but the camera didn't take a scratch. The BW kids did great in their scene, the acting isn't stiff at all - just what we wanted. Again, I stayed up all night syncing audio and video for that scene. Got to sleep maybe around 8 AM.
We were supposed to shoot at 11 AM Saturday, meaning that Mo and Javier were supposed to be at our place at 10 AM. They didn't call us until 12 30, but by some twist of fate our actor for that day (Melissa's dad) had gotten tied up with work, so we ended up just shooting the scene in the afternoon. This posed a problem in that we had one day left to finish our film, and had to climb a mountain to get our first and last shots. The sun went down before we had a chance to even get out to the mountain, so we said screw it and decided to go up before sunrise, so we cold shoot as the sun was coming up and have the rest of the day to finish. I didn't go to sleep that night, as the footage we had shot earlier needed some serious doctoring, and by the time I had put together the whole scene, I was actually LATE for meeting up with them to climb the mountain. So I climbed on no sleep.
It was really freaking cold on the mountain. Javier knows more than either me or Mo, and that's evident in the film, but he did great. It took us about two hours in the dark to find the spot I had scouted out, but when we found it, the sun hadn't even reached the horizon yet. It was literally glorious. We shot about 20 minutes worth of footage (the scenes were 40 seconds total) which took about 4 hours to get that 20 minutes of footage (it's a long and tedious process). Unfortunately some of the most beautiful shots weren't needed in our film, and were deleted when I turned the project in before I had a chance to save it to a DVD. When we were done shooting, we went back to Mo's house (I passed out for about 30 minutes) and he edited the first and last scene (I had edited the rest). At this point, they assumed they were done and revealed to me that they had made plans with another group of actors to shoot a second film that afternoon, "just for the fun of it." Our film was nowhere near done. Yes, the scenes were all shot, dialogue all recorded, and most of the music was synced. BUT, each scene was cut as its own separate project, and there were still titles, credits, sound effects, transitions, and basically just making sure that the whole thing made sense. I gave them a thorough bitching, after which I took Javier to the Marta station (we didn't need him anymore, and he was anxious) and he went off to shoot his film by himself. I'm lucky Mo actually stayed and helped finish, because it took us until 11PM that night to get the whole thing together. There was no possible way we could have done it Monday morning, as one of them had suggested we try. I told them that there was no way in hell we had put all that effort into five minutes of film and we were just going to bail at the last second for some other idea they had. There will be other festivals, other times. You don't do it that way.
Anyway, once we put the final titles on and everything, it seemed done, and we showed it to some of Mo's family at like 11:30 PM, and I went home. That night, I extracted the file to a .mov, and went to the CMF website to see if I had done everything right. Well, CMF needs a .dv file, so I went back and tried to extract another one, and the Macbook Pro tells me it's out of room. Would I like to delete some unnecessary files? Sure, I say, and it deletes half the freakin project!!!! I stayed up the rest of the night and took a one hour nap before school, and headed in to talk to the CMF guys before the madness hit. Luckily, they were able to reconstruct most of what had gotten deleted, and it turned out that the .mov file was what they needed anyway due to the HD camera we had used, etc. The CMF rep burned it to a DVD for me and we were done. Whew.
Now, we've got a little less than three weeks until the festival at GSU, and my gut's been turning circles every minute of the day. I can't WAIT to find out how we did. The odds were stacked against us and there was almost some mutiny, but we pulled through with an amazing finished product. Whether or not we win, I'm happy just to have a film that I had a (rather large) hand in making. And compared to my first film, this looks like a blockbuster. The finale will be at the Georgia State Rialto theater on February 19. You can definitely expect to hear about it afterwards.
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