The Difference a Day Makes

At this time last night, a lot of us were trying to grab a few hours of sleep while worrying about everything that we still had to do and how to rearrange the shooting schedule to make up for getting rained out and whatinthehellwecouldpossiblydo if the weather turned on us again today.  Honestly, by late Saturday night, things had deteriorated to the point that our fearless (and grammatically flawless) director had used the wrong part of speech on camera, so you can imagine how concerned we all were.

24 hours later, the mood has turned from “how are we ever going to…” to “we did it!”

By Sunday, a lot of us were beyond being particular about where we slept.

Somehow, we covered a lot of locations, threw a guy off a bridge, shot up the city streets and filmed a dramatic sunset conclusion, all in a flurry of overpriced coffee, fake blood, portable tables thrown in and out of the back of vehicles and people walking dogs through the shot.

By the end of the day, all these guys (and girl) were starting to look like mail carriers to me.

Sometimes the same dog more than once.  And, of course, postal workers everywhere.

And that’s just the prep work and shooting.  When the cameras stop rolling, there’s still a lot of work to be done, and I’m not just talking about the editing and sound mixing and scoring and production.  It turns out that if you spray a couple of gallons of fake blood on a city street, they sort of want you to mop up behind you.  Entirely reasonable, of course, but when you’re watching the sun drop like someone has just shot it out of the sky and have two locations to fit in before the LAST DAY OF SHOOTING is out and you’re watching blood run down the sidewalk and into the gutter, it can be a bit daunting. Just for a minute.

Someone had to run to Home Depot for a hose.

And after all that, of course, “we did it!” isn’t entirely true just yet.  While a lot of us get to go home to catch a quick nap and hope for the best, there’s a lot of work yet to be done.  And Don is going to start it at any moment.  Truly, he is.  Just like the rest of us are going to actually get up and go home and lie down, instead of sitting here like we’ve been doing for the past two hours, congratulating one another and thinking about how we’re too tired to drive.

In a sense, the real work begins now, and the pressure is still on.

While the technical folks do their thing, I’ll share one last tidbit I picked up this weekend:  If in a sleep-deprived state you misdial the number for Southwest Airlines because you want to change your cameraman’s flight and keep him around a little longer, you just might find yourself staring blankly at your cell phone and wondering why you’re listening to a free sex recording.