Friday night we shot in a condo in Uptown, a large, beautiful loft-style place with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking...well, a lot but things are still developing in that area. Waaaay too nice for Guy's place (a line about it being a "dump" had to be changed) but it was a good find. We shot around to make it look smaller; I'm still not sure how that's going to work. There was a lot of going down a hallway and pretending it went somewhere else. I'd be hard-pressed to try and draw a "floorplan" for Guy's place without using non-Euclidian geometry. Nerd alert!
The couple that owned the place was very accomodating and Manny did everything he could to respect their space. We shot from 6 to 11pm and took a pizza break in the middle. There were two basic setups for the scene with a few angle switches included. We shot the second part first, which was a conversation on Guy's bed. The bed in the condo was in sort of an enclosure that helped sell the closeness of his place. The second part of the shoot was the dish-washing scene, where Guy and Gal wash dishes and she tells him a story about a kooky co-worker. We ended up having to shoot it around twelve times for coverage from different angles. We both had some shakiness on lines when we started but by 11, I could've told that story in my sleep. The dishes, too, were sparkling. Sparkling.
My first impressions of shooting are that I have to shed the self-consciousness I feel when being filmed. It's hard for me to relax like I can when I'm in front of people and yes, I know that sounds insane. Hopefully, that relaxation will come from exposure and I already felt more able to just "do it" on Sunday. Manny's got a lot of cool equipment, some of which is his and some that might be missing from a TV studio somewhere. We are shooting on miniDV in high-def and no, that doesn't mean you'll only enjoy the film if you're high or deaf (wokka wokka).
On Saturday, we shot in Loring Park for the final scene. Before I arrived, Groos and our two dancers were shooting some pickups in an alley near Joe's. It's apparently a very picturesque alley because while we were there we saw two separate photographers and models doing shoots for something or other. The main part of the shoot for us was on the walkways of Loring Park. We shot near sunset so we had to be efficient, but we managed to get a half-dozen takes in, plus coverage. It was a pretty public area as well and several bystanders gathered to watch the filming. Strangely, having an audience felt more natural to me than not. We wore body mikes for the scene because it involved some long shots and I was extremely warm and sweaty in my rockabilly costume. Lots of forehead dabbing.
Incidentally, this was the proposal scene and somewhere between the 5th or 6th knee I took for the camera, I realized that I'd never proposed to anyone before, onstage or off. I feel like the girl who's never kissed anyone before and gets cast as Juliet.
Sunday, we shot the first date scene at Azia. They were extremely cool about letting us shoot off hours and as such, I assume they're ok with me name dropping them here. A few friends of the production showed up to be extras and the setup focused soley on the booth we were sitting in. Manny had an idea for a neat tracking shot thing, but as we had to shoot in the afternoon before the place opened, he decided it wouldn't work with the obvious daylight outside. The shoot itself went well and involved eating way too much luke-warm ice cream. Also, Penny made her terrifying pig noise a couple of times and told a coke story or two. Hollywood!
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