Day 3, 4 and 5

The past few days of shooting have been long and exhausting.

On day 3, we did our first interior shots. We spent 2 1/2 hours shooting video of Royse (the lead character) sulking in his bedroom; then we moved out to our "Dockett Home Exterior" location too late to shoot the scene that was supposed to be shot during the Magic Hour (that's sundown, when the light is a pretty gold/orange). One of the actors we needed for the other scenes went to the wrong location, though, so We decided to rig up some lights while we were waiting, and try our Magic Hour shot anyway, since we had called Amanda all the way out there. It didn't work out right, and we will have to reshoot it. That alone took another 3 hours. and by the time we were finished, it was 4am and we were all freezing and cranky. We did have another guy show up who was working on another project with Craig (Officer Wallace), who had some helpful lighting suggestions and was willing to pitch in. I can't remember his name off hand.

Day 4--what a night! We shot out at Comal Park, right on the lakeshore. John Quest talked the Army Corp of Engineers, which oversees the park, into giving us carte blanche after the park closed, including being able to set a bonfire, despite the statewide burn ban. We got some nice shots, but Robin wasn't sticking to her plan of going through the same scene all night with different POV's...so we are going to have to reshoot that as well, if she wants to flashback the way she scripted it.

Day 5, after some discussion between Mark, Russ Ansley (our Diirector of Photography) and Myself, we determined that the problems that have been slowing us down are a) too much meandering among the crew between shots; and b) not sticking to the shots we had planned. We pretty much corrected those problems during last night's shoot, and everything stayed on schedule. In fact, we finished 30 minutes before I thought we would. We didn't ever have the smashed vase or broken table that Robin had in the script, but it all looked good from what I could see, and the fight scene was realistic enough to hurt Craig. We now have 2 injured actors. Laura (playing the role of Courtney Dockette) hurt her back at the beach doing push ups between takes, yesterday.

The home we shot at belonged to a friend of Russ', and was a huge 2 story mansion on the lake. The owner, Ian, and his 12 year old son were there while we were shooting, and both had to be up in the morning...but I know we were so loud that we kept them awake. It was nice of Ian not to throw us out.

Russ' wife, Lisa, also came back from a trip to Galveston last night, so not only did we have an extra pair of hands, but Russ says she'll feed us well for the rest of the shoot :)