Second Day of Production!
By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer
Today we are at USC shooting the School Bus exteriors. This is also the first day for Morgan (Tom Arnold) and we should have some fun with the scene. The last time we talked to him he had some great ideas for his scenes and I am excited to see how they play through.
So lets talk about night exterior shots. In case it wasn’t already clear, Palo Alto is set entirely at night. Exterior night shots are intense because they require a lot of light everywhere. Lighting the actors in the foreground isn’t too bad, but then you are left a completely black background and the audience won’t know where the actors are. For this reason we needed to throw a lot of light off rooftops into the background. Rachel (DP) will explain about lighting in detail later.
Everything below this line is now being written after day two, in past tense. I am not clever enough to figure out a better transition.So the night was very interesting.
We had 18 shots to take compared with 5 from the night before. As usual we started late and had our first shot at 11pm rather than the scheduled 10:30 pm. It was partly because USC wouldn’t let us set up until 8:30 pm and partly because we had a lot of exotic lighting rigs.
Lights up on the roof:
Lighting the School Bus:
We also had to block the action of Morgan driving the school bus up onto the curb which ended spilling some blood around too:
At around midnight we were way behind shooting schedule and we discussed the possibility of cutting a few shots from our list. Unfortunately the list was already trimmed down so nothing ended up being cut. On top of all this someone informed our grip team that some of the sprinklers hadn’t been shut off and they were going to go on “sometime in the early morning”. Luckily we had a solution for this:
Once it started to get late, we had to a call USC for an extension. Luckily they were very nice and generously gave it to us. The new problem became the Sun, which ruins the set at 5:20am no matter what. It would take some kind of super villain to help us out in that department. Another early morning issue turned out to be chirping birds. They pretty much chirped through most of our takes and we decided to hope it could be edited around.
Ultimately the sun rose with 4 shots still left to take. Poor Autumn Reeser had been waiting around for a couple hours and we never even got to her last shots. She was a good sport about it though. So what happens when production has to wrap early? Pick ups. We are returning to USC tonight to pick up the rest of what we didn’t get as well us the stuff scheduled for tonight.
In retrospect it is good that we went over because it gave us an idea about how much we can handle. This will help scheduling in the future. It is just lucky that we had USC two nights in a row otherwise we’d be much poorer.
Today we are at USC shooting the School Bus exteriors. This is also the first day for Morgan (Tom Arnold) and we should have some fun with the scene. The last time we talked to him he had some great ideas for his scenes and I am excited to see how they play through.
So lets talk about night exterior shots. In case it wasn’t already clear, Palo Alto is set entirely at night. Exterior night shots are intense because they require a lot of light everywhere. Lighting the actors in the foreground isn’t too bad, but then you are left a completely black background and the audience won’t know where the actors are. For this reason we needed to throw a lot of light off rooftops into the background. Rachel (DP) will explain about lighting in detail later.
Everything below this line is now being written after day two, in past tense. I am not clever enough to figure out a better transition.So the night was very interesting.
We had 18 shots to take compared with 5 from the night before. As usual we started late and had our first shot at 11pm rather than the scheduled 10:30 pm. It was partly because USC wouldn’t let us set up until 8:30 pm and partly because we had a lot of exotic lighting rigs.
Lights up on the roof:
Lighting the School Bus:
We also had to block the action of Morgan driving the school bus up onto the curb which ended spilling some blood around too:
At around midnight we were way behind shooting schedule and we discussed the possibility of cutting a few shots from our list. Unfortunately the list was already trimmed down so nothing ended up being cut. On top of all this someone informed our grip team that some of the sprinklers hadn’t been shut off and they were going to go on “sometime in the early morning”. Luckily we had a solution for this:
Once it started to get late, we had to a call USC for an extension. Luckily they were very nice and generously gave it to us. The new problem became the Sun, which ruins the set at 5:20am no matter what. It would take some kind of super villain to help us out in that department. Another early morning issue turned out to be chirping birds. They pretty much chirped through most of our takes and we decided to hope it could be edited around.
Ultimately the sun rose with 4 shots still left to take. Poor Autumn Reeser had been waiting around for a couple hours and we never even got to her last shots. She was a good sport about it though. So what happens when production has to wrap early? Pick ups. We are returning to USC tonight to pick up the rest of what we didn’t get as well us the stuff scheduled for tonight.
In retrospect it is good that we went over because it gave us an idea about how much we can handle. This will help scheduling in the future. It is just lucky that we had USC two nights in a row otherwise we’d be much poorer.
Labels: Week_1
posted by Tony Vallone at
3:03 PM
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