Here’s the latest in the continuing series from the DIY landscape of CHAT. Hopefully those of you about to make your own micro-budgets or eventually want to make one, will glean something from these real-time posts.
- · DAY 9: 4/13/13
Weekend 4—Saturday. Final two days downtown at our Board Of Trade offices. This is the most important day of the shoot, bar none. Difficult to give specifics without compromising story, but let’s just say blood will be spilled today. The gun wrangler brought not just a Clorox bottle full, but a spare Jim Beam bottle filled to the brim with the scarlet stuff. Fun fact: The mixture for fake blood is ¾’s corn syrup, ¼ glycerine. Our guy also brought about five guns including a .9mm Beretta, which will be our weapon of choice. The guy’s got a ZZ Top hat and has brought his daughter in on the business to help with the squibs, several of which we’ll be rigging up today.
It takes time, of course, putting characters into identical clothing for take after take and the crew listens to tall tales about our gun guy working on everything from The Dark Knight to Wanted. One fun story included the time a character in dreadlocks was pasted down in a bloody compound so often he was actually stuck to the ground and had to be unpeeled by crew. Another good one was describing his secret for adding texture to a wound: Hash browns! Gives it a greasy, squishy feel should you happen to need a character to stick his fingers inside the fake wound. Lovely!
The thing about writing in guns into your movie which you find out before you even get on set is that, for insurance purposes, you need to pay for an on-duty policeman to oversee the production. In our case, one of Chicago’s finest. Great guy. Fully armed, shooting the shit with our cop character Detective Songa (Craig Harris) and the gun wrangler. He happily busied himself on his cell phone, chowed down with crew, mostly sitting in one of the $200-buck, black mesh Board Of Trade easy chairs. Be advised: If you go overtime on your day, you will be paying Chicago’s finest time and a half, an expense that quickly saps the ‘ol contingency fund. Thus, Good Writer, for micro-budget, as with visual effects and dialogue-heavy exterior night shots—write them in at your own peril.
Yesterday’s late night schedule—8pm to 7am—was highly concentrated on hallway scenes. We’ll leave the story details to the movie but it involved catsuited women leading an Ivy League educated fellow down a darkened corridor on a dog leash. The sick avocado-green lighting attained by DP (Fred Miller) and his crew is shaded like some bad absinthe dream of a Van Gogh painting, or near Lynch’s Blue Velvet. The hallway scenes just a prelude to today’s action in the bathroom.
This bathroom is straight Board Of Trade boring, at least it was before Fred Miller and director Boris Wexler got through with it. Its small confines are heavily-geled, reds and greens. The look screams 70’s film ala Hardcore, primary colors glitzy, like a nasty version of Dick Tracy.
There’s a lot at stake when Boris calls action on these killing scenes. There is only so much time in the schedule and so many costume changes allowable by budget. This is the one scene where digital doesn’t save you—you can’t keep going back and doing it over and over. We have four takes to get it right, period. Only a skeleton crew can fit in the bathroom along with the actors and tensions run pretty high as the moment comes. It has to come together, camera, sound, blood effects, performance…the falling of bodies has to be just so in frame; no crew images reflected in the mirror; squibs need to blow perfectly and believably. 3-2-1…Action! How did it come out?
We’ll find out soon enough…
- · DAY 10 4/14/13
Chicago, the Windy City. Also the obnoxiously noisy freakin’ city. Shooting indoors today at our Board Of Trade office. The conference room looks out over Jackson Avenue and trying to run dialogue scenes with 3pm activity below? Not ideal. Some of the sound sources that caused us to call “cut” for bad sound today—Passing Brown Line El trains every 7 minutes, passing trolley and Double-decker tourist buses, over-excited Cubby fans just in from Union Station and the western suburbs hooting and hollering in front of the big game with Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh! Add to that squeaky conference room floors, the elevator bings, and Chat-enemy #1-The Saxophone Guy.
Almost the instant we get down to the serious dialogue scene between Syd (Rick Peebles) and Annie (Marielle de Rocca-Serra) the sax guy kicks in with the same awful Sweet Home Chicago serenade, absolutely mocking our attempts at grand cinema. Had to pay him off last week and great, we’re gonna have to pay the dude again. Boris tasks producer Lucy Manda with a “Lucy…the sax guy…hurry…please.” Lucy, sharp as ever, brings our fake cop Craig Harris down with her. You know the stories about heroic citizens lifting cars to free pinned people from traffic accidents? Craig could lift a car himself…with one hand. Five minutes later Lucy and Craig are back, the dulcimer sax tones gone. No bribe funds were paid. Thanks, Craig!
Earlier in the day we are on the street shooting the last of the Falcon exterior shots. Falcon loses his protective glasses and staggers into passerby, unable to handle the bright light. Obviously when you write in these exterior shots you just assume that the production team will get the bright light required on the day you’re shooting. Ah, in Chicago? Even on a sunny day like this, sun only filters through the downtown high-rise canyons, shafts of light amidst shadow. Fred gets the handheld working as Falcon is thrown-out of a building and curses while accidentally stepping on his glasses. The insert takes 20 attempts of getting the glasses to match the master shot, having them fall on the sidewalk in an exact position. They can only be crushed once and Falcon (Rush Pearson) pulverizes them under boot. Thanks to the extras who came out today, including the gentleman who spun tales of some of the 100 movies and TV shows he had appeared in as an extra. Also to our fiesty receptionist (January Stern) who provided a nice punch to a one-line character.
Nail down this last day at our downtown offices. We’ll miss having an entire floor to work on and those $200 buck mesh office chairs, but it’s time to move on. Next week: Falcon’s joint!
