Sunday, July 6th, 2008: Shoot Day #2

Today is all exteriors, and all between Keith and Joe, and it’s all scenes in Niagara Falls and St. Catharines. I’m hoping that we don’t run into any problems today as all the scenes are daylight exteriors, so we can’t fall behind as much as we did yesterday or we’re done for the day. Well, that’s what everyone thinks, so they’re all pretty relaxed knowing that we can’t possibly go as late again.

Little do they know I have a generator, and I’d whip that shit out to shoot the rest of those scenes if need be.

Everyone meets at my place so we can begin our trek to Niagara Falls. We leave Alicia to do the makeup and wardrobe on Keith and Joe, and Bill, Kyle, and I head back to Bills to load up the equipment we’ll need for the day. Like everything we do, this takes longer than expected. We then head back to my place where we load up the dreaded V-16 system.

The plan is to shoot at the Casino Niagara Parking Garage, then head down to the parkway where Joe and Keith meet in the script. We get there without incident, but it’s not until our arrival that I see the giant water-park thing that’s built on top of the parking garage now, that I remember that there’s a giant water-park thing that’s built on top of the parking garage now.

That won’t do.

We’re off to the Sheraton Hotel parking garage that’s beside the Fallsview Casino. Steve leads the way as I tell him I don’t know how to get there. It’s not until we’re about one minute out that I remember that Sue’s mom lives just down the street from here, and I know exactly where we are. It looks like my memory isn’t functioning correctly today.

The parking garage isn’t very high, and it’s at the back of the hotel, away from the Falls. We get all our stuff set up, and Steve goes nuts covering the back of Keith’s car. Man, this guy is crazy with his detail. He’s covering the license plate, letters on Keith’s car, logos on Keith’s car. It’s such a strange new thing to Bill and I as we’re used to setting down the camera where we want it and shooting right away. This cat is crazy with his eye for detail.

We shoot the first shot, which is a pretty simple dolly establishing shot. When we move closer to the car to shoot inside of it, we realize we’re going to have a problem for most of the day. It’s hot and worse than that, it’s bright. It makes seeing the LCD on the camera very difficult.

We rock out this first scene in fairly good time, and we all take a piece of the V-16 system with us as we trek to the front of the Sheraton. The parkway itself is pretty far away from here, but we got a good view, so this will definitely work. The Glidecam balances pretty easily this time out, and I put this huge beast on and we try rehearsing and shooting the scene. My operating on this rig sucks balls right now, but it’s okay, as everyone decides to use this vantage point to scope the Falls.

The shot is supposed to start on the Falls while moving forward, then pan left to see Carter (Keith’s character) looking at the Falls, then walking towards Joe, who we’re following to Carter. We do this a few times and I want to look at the footage before moving on to make sure I got the shot. I can’t be sure as I’m having a hard time seeing the monitor.

It turns out I didn’t record any of it. What was happening is that we would do the scene, we’d stop, I’d hit the record button to stop recording, walk back to our starting positions, I’d hit the record button again and we’d do the scene again. What was really happening though was that I was hitting the record button and stopping the recording when I thought I was starting the recording. So all I got was a bunch of shots of me and Joe walking back to our starting point. Oh well, it was something I did that you can’t help but laugh at.

When I get the record/ stop record situation sorted out, something seemed to have clicked, and I started operating the system a lot better. I add a shot that I know we’ll need and I think it’s a better shot than anything I already planned. We get the hell out of dodge.

The goal on the way back is that everyone will stop for food, we’ll meet up at my place, then quickly chow down and head out to continue shooting. I get dropped off by Bill and I take the camera to watch what we just shot to make sure it was in focus where it needed to be, and the movements were good, while he takes off for subs. Everything checks out, people trickle in, eat, and we’re off again.

We go to the police station for a scene where Grant is supposed to enter. Two scenes later, he leaves the cop shop. Bill came up with a plan to get the shots we need just in case they won’t let us shoot, and we set up the “B” portion of our plan. I don’t want to get into any specifics as to what we would have done had we not been allowed to do our shots, but it was quite elaborate and it would have worked. Luckily they had no problem with us shooting there

Keith pulls his car in front of the camera for the “B” part of the plan, and apparently the officer Steve, Bill and Joe were talking to, said they were about to come and tow Keith’s car away because they thought he was being a jerk and parking there to ruin our shot. We laugh and finish off the two scenes we need at the cop shop.

We then move into another parking lot downtown to shoot another scene. Well, apparently the churches in downtown St. Catharines let their bells fly at five o’clock and give the entire downtown a church bell concert for about twenty minutes. We didn’t know that at the time, we just thought it was chiming to say it was five. After about ten minutes, we figure this isn’t just to let everyone know what time it is.

The bells finally subside, and we shoot our scene before heading to an alley to shoot the last scene in the downtown area. We find a nice spot in the shade and bang the scene out pretty quickly. We then head back to my place to shoot the final scene of the day. We’re running ahead of schedule at this point.

For the final scene, I would like to do it at magic hour, so we can afford to chill at my place for a bit before we go. Eventually, we head out to some weird shit.

We get to the proposed location and immediately decide that we can’t use it as there’re just too many people around. Alright, we bomb over to a backup location, and we’re getting concerned with the light.

We arrive at the Welland Canals Museum to shoot the scene on top of the observation deck. We quickly set up and as we’re rehearsing the scene a huge family of Arabs decide they want to watch a boat go through the locks and they want to do this right in front of the camera. We decide to just do the scene anyway and hope that because we’re shooting, they’ll all get intimidated and move away. I call action to Joe, and they all part for him like the Red Sea parted for Moses. That’s pretty cool. Except they all fall back in line as Joe passes them, and they all watch Joe, and in turn, look right into the camera.

We then go and try to catch a shot of Keith that will hopefully not involve any of the amazed by the boat Arabs. The problem is that Keith has lines, and all the boat lookers are too excited watching the long process of a boat going through a lock system, that they won’t shut up about it. And they’re loud in their enthusiasm. And none of them are speaking English. If they were speaking English, it wouldn’t have been so distracting, but they’re speaking a language I couldn’t even guess the name of, and as such, it’s too distracting to hear Keith.

We decide to wait until the boat passes as it’s almost done now, and we’ll hurry to shoot the rest of the scene. Bill then comes over to me and tells me there’s a boat coming the other way, and the curious onlookers will be inclined to stay and watch that fascinating process as well.

On the way to the Canals Museum, we passed a park with a small hill. We decide to place the scene there and we quickly bomb over to it. On the way we decide never to shoot at the Welland Canals Museum again. We ran into a similar problem with Mennonites while shooting Episode 2 of Lot B. The place is just cursed for us.

Good news, the park is pretty empty, but the bad news is that we’re almost out of magic hour. Bill, Bills brother Kyle, and I jump out of Bills car as soon as we get to the park and set up the first shot. Bill and I have worked together pretty closely for four years so when shit gets down to the crunch like this, it’s oftentimes faster for just the two of us to do everything. We both know what needs to be done, and we don’t really even have to communicate with each other as we just know what each of us is doing in relation to the other.

We don’t rehearse any of the shots, and we just record everything. We manage to get everything done that we need to get done, but we go over by about ten minutes, and magic hour is gone for our last shot.

Alicia and Steve head off from here to return home, and Melon takes off too. The rest of us head off to my place where Joe takes off as we have a really early call time for tomorrow. To my surprise, Keith decides to kick around for awhile and shoot the shit with us. This was a nice surprise as I haven’t seen Keith in awhile and it’s always great to catch up with him.

Keith is one of the best, most nicest guys you’ll ever meet in your life. Plus, he’s a gamer, so that makes him aces in my book, even if his console is the PS3 and not the 360, or “The Box” as I like to call it. Yes, that’s the only box I refer to as “The Box.” Mainly because I can play with the 360 anytime I want to.

Bill, Sue, Kyle, Keith and I shoot the shit for about two hours as we’re eaten alive by mosquitoes. We talk about today’s shoot and we both agree that it was important that during his scenes with Joe, there needed to be a bond there. We both agree that there was. It’s important that you can sense that bond because Keith’s character Carter, and Joe’s character Grant grew up together in the script. The last scene we shot, the characters each kind of sense that this is the last time they’ll see each other, and so there has to be an undertone of remorse to it, and you can only get that if you’ve bonded with the other actor. That was definitely there.

Keith also tells me that he and Joe know a lot of the same people, so I’m sure that helped that bond be established even more.


We also stumble on the fact that even though Keith and I have worked together five times now, every time he shoots one of my projects, he’s only down for a day, and he wouldn’t mind doing more. This is funny because I always thought we were doing him a favor by only having him down for one day and doing all of his scenes on one day. Now that I know I can take advantage of him in the future, I definitely will.

I thought the scenes went very well today, even if Bill and I had to take over at the end because of Mother Nature and her fickle ways. At least it didn’t rain.

I’m pretty happy that we only got behind by about ten minutes or so today. Hopefully tomorrow we can make this into a trend, and be right on time or even early.