Well, dear readers, we had an exhaustingly exhausting first day of shooting and thankfully got everything that was scheduled and two things scheduled for today. First days are always a little trying and this was no different – and the trying part is always the first hour. We were starting with an extremely simple little scene at the front door. What I didn’t know was that it’s a weird front door with almost no room to shoot. I broke the scene down to make it easier, but we finally came up with a way to shoot it that wasn’t too weird. Once we were thankfully beyond that, everything went smoother. The cameraman is young but very good and not only did we move along at a steady clip, I actually ended up doing more coverage than I’d planned. Also, because we’re pretty much doing all the apartment scenes episode by episode, we’re repeating set-ups a lot, but that’s easier than having Sami have to change wardrobe and hair if we attempted to do all the shots at one time in a particular place. A little nutty, but the better option is the one we chose. These scenes are all between Sami and the fellow who plays her BFF. Sami is, in fact, in every scene of all ten episodes. They play well together and they’re finding the rhythm as we go, because I write in a very specific comic rhythm that you can’t really fight. We wrapped on time at five, so that was good.
They brought in lunch from somewhere – I had a small thing of decent mac-and-cheese. I’d only gotten four hours of sleep the night before – fell asleep right after posting the notes, but woke up at four in the morning and could not fall back asleep due to ABS (Active Brain Syndrome). Afterwards, Sami’s mom and I had a proper meal at a jernt around the corner from me – Old John’s Diner, I think is the name of it. I had meatloaf and Sami’s mom had rigatoni in a pink sauce. I sampled that and it was very good and the meatloaf was fine. I came right back to the place where I’m staying, got in my bed clothes, and sat on the bed like so much fish, channel surfed and pretty quickly fell asleep for two hours, so that was a good thing. And now, I am writing these here notes, in case anyone was wondering. Posting them at midnight here is pointless, unfortunately, as the site is set to Pacific Standard Time and it screws up changing the day. When I got up at seven, I tried several different ways to change the day and couldn’t because there’s no AM/PM function. So, I did it in a roundabout way, cloned the notes into a new form and posted them from that and nuked the other one. So, for these here notes, I’m going to schedule them for just after midnight and hopefully that will work, although I won’t know until I get up in the morning. I think that covers about everything, the main takeaway is that everyone felt good about what we accomplished. Our wardrobe person is doing a great job and so is our makeup and hair lady.
Rearranging the apartment to suit our needs was a bit of a challenge but we did it in a way where everything looks natural and photographs well.
Today, I’ll be up by seven, I’ll shave and shower, and then be on my way to the restaurant where we shoot the first scene of the day. I think at five pages, it’s the longest scene in the entire series. The restaurant is literally just a few doors away from the apartment. So, we get in there at nine, set up the table, and then begin shooting at ten, at least that’s the hope. I should think we’ll be done with that by noon, then they’re feeding us, then we’ll get right back to the apartment and can hopefully continue with those scenes from one to five or maybe a bit longer, depending on where we are. We only have two tiny things to shoot for episode four, and then we move on to five and six. If we can get both of those, we’ll be in good shape for tomorrow. But there are two sequences in five and six that are a little complicated, but hopefully we’ll get through those okay. The good news is that we know what the setups are for each part of the apartment, so the cameraman just pulls up what we’ve shot and we match it. Not sure if there’ll be a meal when we wrap because Wednesday is a full day on location and somewhat complex.
The rest of the week is full every day – no really light days at all.
Well, dear readers, I just take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up by seven, shave and shower, then be on my way to the restaurant, then to the apartment, then finally back here. Oh, and a Happy New Year to all our Jewish dear readers. Today’s topic of discussion: There is a new recording of The Music Man just released. I haven’t heard any of it save for samples of Rock Island Line and Iowa Stubborn. The sound is old-fashioned, like we used to do – big and roomy. But when did it become a lazy thing to put a drumbeat on Rock Island Line? The entire POINT of the number is that the salesmen make the train rhythm by themselves – that’s the genius and brilliance of the number. Do they think audiences so stupid that they won’t understand that? I mean, they’re on a train set. What do you think of that sort of thing? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy that the first day of shooting went well, and hopeful that today’s shoot goes equally well.