Well, I didn’t almost die on this day, so it was already off to a better start. Remember how well the first day went, and how we got everything done early, and everything was generally sunshine and butterflies? Ha!

I’ll get to that in a minute. Our second day of shooting was a day of firsts (see what I did there?): Our first day with our very talented lead actress, Autumn Hurlbert, our first day recording any sort of musical number, and our first day (of five) at Central City Studios. Central City is a huge warehouse of standing sets... for the uninitiated, a standing set is a specific set that exists for rental or use by film/tv/commercials. Central City has a number of these sets, including offices, a court room, an apartment, and a hospital set, which is what we used. Now, obviously there was no hospital scenes in our film, but we were able to convincingly turn the standing hospital set into a laboratory set, thanks to our production designer, Lia Lopez (with an assist from art director Ben Boquist). The sets all looked great, after much work and prep.

The other two firsts happened right at the beginning. The first scene was Autumn, by herself, singing her part of “Sudden Death!.” I complimented Lutz yesterday, so I guess I have to do it for Autumn too... kidding. I could go on all day about both of these guys... and Autumn was a blast to work with. As talented as she is, she never really had any “diva” moments. She was very flexible and is the type of person that everyone just seems to like. Which makes my job a whole lot easier... there are actors that are very talented and act like they’re God’s gift to you and everyone else, and then there are actors like Matt and Autumn: both extremely talented but still down to earth. It makes a shoot fun when the people you work with are not only easy to get along with, but are the type of people that you’d want to be friends with even if you weren’t doing a film. That’s true of Matt and Autumn, and of the rest of our crew as well. We were definitely very blessed with the people we worked with.

Anyway, enough praise. For those of you that don’t know how shooting a musical works, when you’re shooting the musical numbers, you have pre-recorded vocals (which I detailed the other day) that the actors sing along to (so their lips match). An important aspect of this is having them actually sing along, rather than lip-synching. It just doesn’t look quite right if they aren’t actually singing. Anyway, that all went great.

Now, for the not so great stuff. I was very happy with everything we shot that day... the problem was we just didn’t shoot very much. We only got off 5 shots that day... which is not a lot, and only 1/3 of what we were ideally trying to get to that day. For as quick as everything went on Monday, things could not have gone slower on Tuesday. Why? I don’t know, really, we never did figure it out. It was just one of those things. A crew that hasn’t worked together before working with a camera our DP had never used before, shooting musical numbers (which I had never done before)... all of that equals a slow day. We were very fortunate to have someone fill in for the crew member that didn’t show the day before, so that didn’t really slow us down, but everything else just.... went... slow.

And then on top of that... well, if you ever wondered what a $200 outtake looks like... Basically, we’re all tired and a bit frustrated that we’re so behind at the end of the night, and we’re trying to rush one of the last scenes of the film... the emotional climax, and the hardest scene in the film, acting wise. So, we’re trying to push it, and overall this is just not a good idea, but we didn’t have a lot of choice. At the end of the scene, Matt’s character falls to the ground and bumps the workstation. Which is all fine and good, except for at the end of the night, when he fell, he hit the “glass” (it’s not really glass) door on the workstation with his head, causing it to crack badly. Matt’s head was totally fine, in fact, at first, he didn’t even know it had cracked. It was just one of those unavoidable accidents that wasn’t anyone’s fault, it just happened. Which is why you budget for weird things like this.  We ended up having to call it a day because we were getting close to our time anyway (we’re only contracted technically for 12 hour days), and it was going to take too long to figure out how to fix the workstation. So, we called it.

All of this kind of brought me down a bit. Enough so that we had to have sort of an emergency meeting between me, MaryAnn Clark (the AD) and Dave Selle (the DP) to try and figure out what we had to do to move faster. We were seriously a bit concerned about not being able to shoot everything we needed to in the time allotted, to the point that we considered cutting several shots, lines, etc... Basically, as great as we felt after day one, that feeling was gone by the end of day two. In the end, though, we decided we didn’t want to risk the integrity of the film, and we just decided we’d somehow move much faster on day three. Did we? Find out next time on.... TALES OF SUDDEN DEATH! (that’s a terrible title. I’m sorry.)