Friday, 8/4 Shooting Right Hand Drive – Day 2

Today was a much better day than yesterday. I think it may have something to do with a good night’s sleep.

Again, we did not make our goal for the day’s shoot. We had an ambitious plan for 6 5/8 pages for the shoot today.

It is pretty cool the way it all works (for the Anystream folks this is remarkably similar to Scrum). Every scene is broken into eighths of pages. The minimum length a scene can be is 1/8 of a page. (I am pretty sure that this is because there is a minimum overhead to shooting a scene so that no matter how short the actual take is there are still all the other tasks of setting up the camera, dressing actors, doing makeup, setting up lighting, etc.) We can now do some math (always a good thing ) and figure out what our average pages/hour should be given that the script is 96 pages and Mark wants to shoot over a four week period.
96 pages / 4 weeks / 6 days per week / 12 hours per day = 1/3 page per hour (or 4 pages per day). You may have noted that the schedule is grueling, 12 hour days 6 days a week. Fionn (the production manager) likened a shoot to a marathon in that you really needed to pace yourself. And after two days I really see what he means.

I will make a point of posting our daily progress of what we have done and what we have left to go. Here is the “Page Burndown Graph” for the end of today.

I met more of the actors and actresses today. So far I have met the actors playing the following characters: Even, Ruth, Ashley, Sri, Mr. Thomas, Mrs. Thomas, Kelsey, Norman, and Joan. Everyone seems very nice and personable.

As usual I find it fascinating interacting with people who are quite different from me both culturally and professionally. It is enjoyable to hear their stories of where they grew up, how they became involved with the movie industry, where they live now, etc.

Even though it is Friday the “weekend” is still a day away. No rest for the weary.

Here is another picture of shooting one of the scenes. It looks remarkably similar to any other picture of a movie set except that Mark is in the shot!

This is a shot of Aunt Ivy's cottage (for those of you who know the story already this should be a real treat!)